Millions of tragedies happen every day that could have been avoided by being subscribed to The Duckstack. This means: I am filing a class action lawsuit against the entire planet. Everybody owes me. They could have read my blog, they chose not to, and look what the world has come to. Disease. Destruction. Death. Jaywalking. Millions of police officers, millions of judges, all to rectify your mistake. Enough is enough. I’m going to be awarded damages. I’m going to be so rich. Don’t let yourself be caught in the crossfires. If you aren’t already one of the noble, chosen few who already subscribes, do not despair. I can be merciful. I can be magnanimous. Will I be? That’s up to you.

Love Thy Enemy

Can’t love my enemies if I don’t have any. Checkmate, Jesus

On September of 2025 a rabid Evangelical drove his truck into a Latter-Day Saint chapel in Michigan and shot a bunch of kids. In an endless outflowing of compassion, millions of Christians of all stripes and varieties joined hands in united solidarity, and took to social media to denounce the Latter-Day Saints as unchristian and the antichrist, rebuking reporters, governors, and Donald J Trump for miscategorizing the victims. As the shooter himself had calmly explained on public radio mere days before, Latter-Day Saints are actually Not Christians, and are in fact The Antichrist. There’s a clip of the audio, floating around somewhere. The killer went out in a literal blaze of glory, having methodically set the chapel on fire, one final righteous stand against the cult of believing the trinity is kind of more like a perfectly united council rather than one single being.

One begins to suspect the highest duty of any Serious Christian is saving their God from the terrible danger of being associated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I call this “semantic gnosis”, or salvation by metaphysical profession. Its a real thing, and it is very serious to most Christians. I think this very conveniently removes Christ from the equation, swapping a living God out for a controlled proxy variable, but I do not actually blame Christians for their behavior1. The Bible is all they have, so from my vantage point, they’re trying their best when they say we’re all super murderers who are going to get people tortured for eternity or whatever. Its fine. What I do blame these Christians for is lying.

One man who joined in the social media fun of dogpiling anyone who erroneously wept for the dead Latter-Day Saints is now running for Governor of Idaho. Mark Fitzpatrick is some sort of MAGA extremist which I would normally think is great for him except that he is not running for governor of his home state of California, but has instead transplanted himself to Idaho, which is probably the most LDS dominated state apart from Utah itself, and the membership there is far less fairweather.

Mark, like pretty much everyone else who enjoys ranting about how unchristian the Church of Jesus Christ is, in the wake of his governor bid now seeks to assure us that he “loves Mormons” and “totally has mormon friends” and for some reason expects people to buy this. This is where I take issue. I do not mind self-righteousness as such, but he seeks to excuse himself, and this is how we know that his conscience is not unsullied. He has painted himself into an ideological corner and now that he’s found his ideology didn’t prevent infinite consequences he wants to walk it back. When he loses he will of course return to his vomit, probably going much further against the church than he did in the past, rather than learning anything.

Of course, this guy is probably correct that his opponent is “sort of soft on immigration” or whatever, but when you want to destroy our culture and way of life then you’re doing the exact same thing that makes immigration bad. Mass immigration may not be in LDS Idahoans self interest, but religious antipathy towards them definitely isn’t either, and expecting our people to sacrifice themselves for your ideology is simply hubris. Claiming you “definitely love super murderers” is hubris too.

Tough Love is a true principle. Enablement Is Not Love is also a true principle. I don’t think any Latter-Day Saint in Idaho expected this guy to agree with their religion, convert, or even pretend alignment. But anyone with eyes can tell there is a thin line between Tough Love and “Not Love At All Actually”. The conqueror may truly believe he brings a better way of life to the Savages, but pretending to altruism is a thing he cannot do. His major motivation is himself, this is nowhere more apparent in politics.

You can love your enemies. Christ commanded this, but what most Christians (myself included) tend to do about this is to say “well my way is better, therefore when I hit you, I am expressing love”. You are not. You are expressing narcissism. Love for your own ideology is not, strictly speaking, love for others. Much less for your enemies.

There is a practical aspect here as well. In real life, (as leftists never tire of reminding us), solutions don’t apply at scale. Most things have exceptions, and ideal solutions are always the ones adapted to individual circumstance, and the less you account for individual circumstance, the greater the likelihood of collateral damage. Maybe such is necessary- but it isn’t “love”. In many cases, callously applied systems do not even work.

Being flamboyantly callous is, however, a really easy way to earn Based Points. You can signal virtue at essentially no cost of action, which is something the Prude Right loves. Being allergic to compromise allows you to posture as a reliable voice on an issue, even though you never get anything done. So there is an incentive gradient to stay away from the best approaches, compounded by how drastic many political (and religious) issues really are. Of course, “nuance” can be an extremist stance too, and a highly evasive one at that- so it really does all come down to the sincerity of the individual. While I’m sure Mark Fitzgerald has some good ideas, he simply couldn’t bring himself to be sincere. And this is one of the keys you can use in your own life, to more closely attune your conscience to God, and is in fact one of the big uses of prayer. By looking inward at your own sincerity, stripped of posturing and publicity, you can improve two vital life skills: You can more easily recognize God’s voice, and you can more easily recognize your own.

Duckstack Science: Beakers

If there’s no beakers, it isn’t science

Every day, liquids are getting poured into beakers, and beakers are getting roasted on Bunsen burners, and apparatuses are dripping drops into beakers, and does anyone stop to ask how the beakers feel about this? Our lab boys did a poll and they found the answer: Absolutely not. In fact, extrapolating from our sample (n=1) nobody on the entire planet has ever apologized to a beaker for lighting it on fire or manhandling it, or any of the other abuses that occur in the workplace. This is a clear HR violation. But the lab boys say it isn’t feasible to writeup everyone in the world for this2. I trust my lab boys. They’re self serving here, but that’s what Jesus called smart3, so we’re going to do it, we’re just going to write it all off and call the whole thing square, but put all the scientists through workplace harassment training and sensitivity lecturers in order to funnel money to our politically aligned NGOs. Everybody wins!

History

Our son woke up late at night and cuddled with me while I was writing this. After a while, I told him its probably time for him to go to bed. He thought about it, and hesitantly said: “I feel like, its too… Comfy.”

While on the bed our son said he was cold, so I threw the entire blanket over him. “Here’s a blanket.” He sat motionless under it for a moment before commenting, “This is too much blanket for me.”

“There’s only two donut stores in the world”. He’s counted

The toddler at the dinner table spontaneously identified everyone in the house. Baba. Mama. Ai Ai. Bay-bee.

Our toddler has started saying “ya” to things, its very adorable

Took our son out to Fathers-And-Sons, which is basically just a boys campout once a year for your church congregation. Our Bishop (semi-equivalent of a pastor, but Bishops more do administration rather than giving talks) gave a nice fireside speech about pursuing a relationship with God and Joseph Smith’s example, and then someone threw a 3 foot diameter by 8 feet log on the fire, which didn’t burn at all. So we learned a lot both spiritually and scientifically. Our son says he “wants to go camping forever.”

Animal Facts

A comprehensive guide to the wilderness

FACT #1: dogs have fur. Bears have fur. Fish have fur, but scaly.

FACT #2: Cats purr, Lions purr, we all purr, for ice cream. Write that down.

FACT #3: Snakes slither on their bellies, just like my kids sometimes.

FACT #4: Horse runs are called “Gallop”, which is like human skipping but sideways, sort of like crabs

#FACT5: Fish lay eggs. Snakes lay eggs. Chickens lay eggs. Coincidence?

FACT6 #6: Birds do not like being upside down. Thanks, gravity!

A Game of Telephone

Is your refrigerator running?

Here is a game anyone can play with their phones: hacky sack

Ducksnax #112

JumpingJacks

By reading this, receiving this, or being in proximity to someone reading this, you agree to release The Duckstack from all liability for any devastating insights into the nature of reality which will warp your mind and personality into a shuddering refugee from the great seams. We don’t consider this likely given, you know, the nature of the topics we typically cover but we wanted to get ahead of it. Some other things our Chief Duckstack Occultist Richard does not consider likely and which you release us of liability for are:

• Gaining the Eyes of the Depths, your sensory apparatus unraveling frayed into the Astral

• Becoming a professor of sayings, the man who knows, or a teacher of stuff, the woman with wisdom. You agree such knowledge or wisdom will not extend to wiggling your way out of Duckstack Prelude Liability Agreements1.

• Cryptological Speciating. Divergent evolution from humanity towards an encrypted worldview, way of doing things, wrapt within an opaque and coded biology

• At Least One Email

• Wiremade traces visible to you, a comprehension of the paths, linker nodes at your fingertips. This is incredibly useful and may alienate2 you from your peers.

There’s more but I wouldn’t want to worry you. They are, after all, unlikely.

Upon Genetic Hypotheticals

Would you still love me if you were a worm3

There is a common leftist thought experiment that goes like this: What if you were born as an Afghan Muslim? Then you’d be Muslim. Therefore your beliefs don’t mean anything. Bet you feel stupid now, huh? And they’re right. I do feel stupid. But mostly because I’m sleep deprived today, not because this is a good thought experiment.

Now. Imagine you are a duck. You’re now influenced, obviously, by your duck physiology- you want to eat bugs, swim, quack, and other things ducks do4, and your preferences are modulated by what’s available to you in the wider duck culture. If your duck parents have the right gene, you might have a predisposition to duck alcoholism. If Ducks have a culture of stacking, you’ll learn to stack too.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this thought experiment. It can be kind of fun to imagine how your preferences and personality might translate to duckhood. I do so every day. Compared to that, imagining you were born with an extra finger or a liberal5 is easy, and it might be useful to discovering where some of your biases come from, which is why leftists like this thought experiment- they’re all deconstructionists and any rhetoric that can be used to knock any standard or system down a peg immediately becomes leftist rhetoric. But not everything is wrong just because it is leftist. Sometimes you have to knock real and good things down to build them up stronger. Some things are wrong because they aren’t right enough.

So asking you to imagine being someone else isn’t bad, except we all suspect that the motive in doing so is usually to teach some very specific “lesson™” about “empathy™” and “obligations™” and “white people™”. As opposed to, like, carbon atoms in the oort cloud. Imagine you were born as a carbon atom in the oort cloud. Why’s it restricted to humans?

Some people online are calling this the “Rawlsian Veil of Ignorance”, which my 2 minutes of googling tells me goes like this: “Imagine nobody could tell who anyone was and you had to make laws. You’d make laws to support the most pathetic people just in case you’re one of them. So that’s the best system of government.” Well. The solution to Pascal’s Wager isn’t to play along with it, its to recognize that you are being mugged6.

The right wing response to this leftist thought experiment is still being developed. Most of my friends have coalesced around the answer of “you could never be anyone but yourself because who you are is genetic” which is at least 30% true7, but if we’re being honest this is mostly a dodge of the question, and a deliberate one at that (being unwilling to imagine not eating breakfast is different than being unable). They correctly sense they’re being tricked but they don’t know the trick to avoid it in specific. So they deny the existence of the soul and then act like leftism is stupid for accepting the existence of the soul. But affirming the existence of the soul isn’t inherently leftist lol

If there is an “cosmic antechamber of souls” (what my gentile friends are calling the pre-existence/premortality) then it directly stands to reason that pre-existent actions would have pre-existent consequences, both for who you are and even what mortal circumstances you’re born in. If you’re a leftist and you buy that all these spirits were hanging out somewhere before getting sucked into bodies, wouldn’t it stand to reason that those spirits had some influence in their embodiment process? Would it even stand to reason that the embodiment process is nonsentient? Surely spirits formed relationships, and sought out ways to find each other again “on the other side”. Perhaps some spirits worked for who they became on Earth. If you’re a leftist and you think birth happens through a nonsentient vacuuming of the soul, then why wouldn’t you also believe souls can just wait to step into the cosmic vacuum until its aligned correctly?

But all of these are metaphysical assertions- basically unprovable, at least on a colloquial level. But even gesturing vaguely at the theological payload is enough to attempt the sort of mental extortion going on here. If you can’t physically take someone’s stuff or force them to physically support your causes, then your next best bet is to get them to forfeit their right to ownership in the first place, through either cleverness, “empathy”, or, hiding from them the existence of their claim and right in the first place. Cindarella’s step mother. There is no need to try to battle metaphysics with metaphysics when this question comes up. You are a right winger. You can simply name the demon: Privilege Is Not Random.

Now, I am not a determinist- I do not believe God engineers and micromanages every aspect of people’s lives and arranges every event that comes to you. Sometimes there really is a confluence of wildly complex variables that play into specific situations- the butterfly effect. Enough that it feels random, and random things really are by definition undeserved. Some guy chose to get a glass of water which reminded him to water the garden which made him slightly late and then he got stuck behind a person driving slow which made him later so he sped and got into a car accident and every one of these tiny choices could have been different8.

At a macro scale its normal to call such a wild confluence of events “luck”, although this is technically inaccurate- and herein lies the sleight of hand employed by the deconstructionists. It relies on the reasonability of conflating complexity with luck, therefore you say “I was lucky enough to be born in a good family” rather than “I stand on the shoulders of giants, and my parents pasts, and the millions or billions of tiny good9 choices that they made which brought me here.” Its just easier to think about, for starters.

But leftists are not usually being convenient or lazy when they ask this, they are trying to sell you on the (blatantly false) idea that all people are equal and you’re no better than anybody else, as though aggregations of systems10 cannot be judged. They tell you explicitly that inheritance is immoral. “You may own it, but you shouldn’t, because you didn’t build it.” If the Right of Conquerors doesn’t exist, then all virtue is up for re-negotiation, which is why they have such a vested interest in getting you to give up your inheritance. If you don’t “deserve” it, who does? Ideally they want you to default to kindergarten morality- “just share with people who haven’t had a turn yet.” But it doesn’t work in turns. Getting you to focus on what you personally did is to hide the obvious answer to the question of who actually owns your inheritance, which is: Whoever gave it to you. They deserve to decide what to do with what they built. And You deserve to decide what to do with what you have, but you can’t decide that it was never yours. That is not physically possible.

The reason this rhetoric is liberal is because the emphasis is to revoke accountability. The right wing flipside of unearned glory would be stewardship- the right of kings. You stand on the shoulders of giants and therefore you have a responsibility to honor and increase. If you’re thinking carefully, it is almost trivial to turn this thought experiment into a conservative one by simply saying “No, this actually is Mine.” Conservatives are already trying to do this by saying people are 100% genetics and you could never be born as anyone else. And genetics is certainly a more important part of it than most people like to give credit. Its definitely healthier to believe than thinking your spirit happened to go into a body of the wrong gender or whatever. Latter-Day Saint scripture says the body and spirit combined are the soul of a man. I would add to that and say culture. We’re all a product of the water we swim in and on that the only thing you can do is to seek better waters.

But most people don’t. And their parents didn’t. And their neighbors didn’t. That’s why their lives are the way they are- luck doesn’t play into it nearly at all. Africa is extremely resource rich! Their problem is not a lack of “access” or “amenities” like water. Brigham Young led the Saints into a desert with zero water, told them to make it a utopia, and they just did. I deserve access to that Utopia just because I am here, and you can’t even make some colonialist stolen land nonsense claim because nobody even wanted Utah until they made it blossom. Anyone who demands pity access is for sure an ingrate and most likely a robber. “Should you give up something for nothing” is where the real snakes of morality dwell. You’re getting conned brother

Its natural to look at the greats of the past and think you do not measure up. This can even induce a sense of guilt, and guilt can feel very righteous. This is one of Satan’s prime strategies on Earth- See, you are naked, go and hide. Its not what God wants. You are to stand before him naked with the talents he gave you and give an account of your increase. What you “deserve” and what other people deserve does not even factor into it. If you can’t feel pride for something your ancestors did, you certainly can’t feel guilty for something you didn’t even do. Exported guilt that has nothing to do with you, that’s where Satan dwells, just as Satan dwells in exported humility, faux humility for virtues you do not possess but enforce by proxy through government ‘charity’ and public posturing and scolding. Its all masturbation, and in the end the RW are correct that your feet really are rooted to where you truly do stand.

AI goblins

Distinct from AI gremlins, which are an entire different thing

Someone recently found out that AIs somehow have a system prompt instructing them to not talk about goblins. Nobody knows why, but many people have been investigating. One person tried to get AI to reverse engineer what a goblin is, and in the process generated the most Latter-Day Saint image I have ever seen in my entire life. I can’t even comprehend how LDS it is, it boggles the mind.

History

Stained deck, stained kids, samsara

Our son rushed in after interacting with the new baby, all excited: “She called me waa!”

At church there was a mothers day program featuring the kids singing “love at home” or something along those lines. Our son sang great and when the song was done he announced to the congregation: “I did like, so good!”

Son whining: “baby is cuter than me”

Duckstack Technology: new plane

5D

I’ve invented a new plane its just a really, really big frisbee. frisbees already fly so lets just pile a bunch of people on one. just take your vertigo pills first

Ducksnax

Piñata

5

Imagine you were born with an extra liberal

You know how when there’s a cake on the counter and its just calling out to you? Well my cake is calling me. My cake is calling me “bobdaduck”. “That’s Mr. Duck, to you. You’re no acquaintance of mine.” I tell it. The cake is informing me that I am two weeks past due on my automobile payment. I tell the cake to do something extremely anatomically improbable. The cake pulls out a gun. I roll my eyes. This is the third cake mugging this week. I do the same thing I always do. Get shot. “Writing newsletters doesn’t pay1 much2.” As I bleed out the cake calls out to me. “Then write more.” Here we are34.

Pending

I have rung your doorbell with this pen to bring you this important message

The Duckstack Zoo has acquired5 a new animal which is a pen bird, it has little bird feet and little bird wings but is just a pen, but it is quite alive. It hops around and twists itself from side to side to get a good look at you, fluttering and ruffling its wings to get them comfortable. Its unique call, a two pitch trill fills your house. It bends down and slams its head into the ground, pecking up grit and pebbles to eat, which it will convert along with the rest of its diet into the ink which is its bloodstream.

It can write but is quite illiterate. Its childlike scrawl is all but indecipherable, but may operate to mark its territory and attract a mate. Its grey plumage belies the colorful ink within, which coloration can change depending on its diet. It is a surprisingly robust animal6, curious, and intent in everything it does, and we can all learn a lot from it.

Sermon: The Machine God

It really grinds my gears

If you believe in God, at all, then you must acknowledge God could, in theory, tell everyone what religion to follow. So your belief system needs to account for why he doesn’t. To find a meme like this compelling requires your explanation to be simplistic, “its all Satan”

Its a variant problem of evil. Call it “The problem of lack of omnipotent clarity” or just “the problem of confusion.” I think you can see from internet atheists that most theist answers to this are actually very bad, because we observe most theists cannot accept God blessing heresy

People take for granted that if their religion is True then it must also be Important, but these are two separate propositions, and it does not necessarily follow at all. Anyone seeking to make converts must answer both. There must be a “why” to one’s directives

The standard answer theists give tends to be something like “to get to heaven”, as though God is a sort of referee with no investment in how people play a game, his only job being to call when you’ve correctly followed scoring procedure. Even non-theist religions are like this

To me this is a major red flag that the theological doctors of the various faiths are running on fumes. If you believe life is a giant marshmallow test+lottery, that’s an inadequate life map. In such a view God, any god, would be wasting a whole lot of everyone’s time for mere invisible/theoretical ends

If the point of life is to, at some point in your ~80 year timeline, make (for example) a verbal confession of faith, then what is all this other stuff. I have to work a job. what the crap. I can stub my toe and also I get to play video games. Theres a lot there

even within religions many doctrines and commandments are seen as “periphery”.

This is a logistical problem, not everything can be of maximal importance all the time. Call it “Dunbar Commandments”. Its probably less than 150. But there are way more than 150 good things in the world. So it should be expected that faiths are somewhat optimized

For how encompassing the Abrahamic God is on paper, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are some of the worst offenders here. This provides an easy route to gotchas like “atheists are more moral”, which is a smuggled goalpost-shift- atheism is superior to Christianity at optimizing for atheism

Atheism is an entirely Abrahamic phenomenon, of course. The ideological assumptions about morality are baked into atheism, including worldview supremacy. You just pick a more peripheral part of Christianity that atheism does better (like “tolerance” at and center it

There is a great spectrum of behaviors that are prosocial or antisocial, and a second y axis for whether these behaviors are of good character or poor character, and another axis where such behaviors are personally beneficial or not, playing with the numbers to present a nice face is trivial, religion tries to draw a regression line through 150 dimensional space

Even with God intervening this isn’t easy. A lot of scriptural absolutism or what we call Pharisaical is cope for this, rules substitute for faith often enough that you can get away with making rules into an idol, then at least you know what you’re doing. God hates that

There exist many funhouse and bizarre mutations of pharisaism. Salvation by correct profession/belief, eternal character insinuations as a response to sin, what those looking to self justify term “judgementalism” but it does happen sometimes. The lack of granularity exposes the attack vector but if you have the spirit of faith you shall not fear

This is what Paul meant when he said to the pure are all things pure. He became all things to all people to lift them up. Impractical but a directionally correct strategy7. The problem with eating meat in a pagan temple, participating in their rituals, it isn’t the participation, its the implication, the appearance of evil

It isn’t a free for all. There really is a regression line and you will be better off moving along it. But you cannot possibly see all the variables, let alone on another person’s path. That’s why faith is vital. Your personal disposition to pursue good. To move along the axis as best you can.

God isn’t going to condemn someone for failing to find the right religion. But he will condemn someone for failing to look into and seek the continuous Better. The meat eaters aren’t superior to those ready only for Milk but at least both are eating. You can immediately tell receptivity to the truth

God won’t condemn someone for their sect. But if you hear the gospel- the true gospel, not just the commandments, not just its signs, its trappings, and do not take the opportunity to advance- that is when you are in danger. The saints baptize for the dead and most of the dead receive it, but intent, motive power, will, is not created equal, I warn you that God knows this

The good news is that salvation really is by Grace. The bad news is that all actions have maximal, eternal consequences. “Who then can be saved?” The same way as a mustard seed: Grow.

The Tree Who Run the Race

medical advise

This tree is ready for the marathon, not a sprint. Its in its little red wagon and its ready to go. Its got its little tree limbs out and its gonna swim that pavement like oars, I tell you. Its got designer sneakers, sitting in its wagon. Running shoes, brand new. They almost sparkle in the sun. Its jersey doesn't fit well but you can tell its serious. Its here to win.

And there off. The tree is scooting down the road at record speed8. The other racers have legs but they don't have the tree equivalent of heart9. Look at that tree go. He’s passin’ ‘em. He’s finished fifth. Better than anyone expected. Defied. Great job tree. The tree that run the race.

history

Our son now calls the baby bouncer “the baby launcher”

“Are you south north?” -unprompted

“I WON TIC TAC TOE” I look over, the grid is just covered in Xs

Son staring in the mirror: “I want three million eyeballs.” And then in a different, higher pitched voice he says to himself: “three million eyeballs? But that will turn you into a monster!”

K-Pop demon hunter is a current sensation. But it is all my son knows about Korea. Korean “which ones are the demons”?

Our son ran over and we asked him where his sister is. He told us “She’s in the greenhouse.” And then our rule about leaving the greenhouse stuff alone occurred to him and he continued: “But I escaped from the greenhouse… before someone got mad at me.”

Our son was playing with the baby and she said to him, ‘aueue’, and he ran in incredibly excited. “She talks now! She talks now!”. A little bit later he was talking to her and asked us sadly: “Why isn’t she saying hi?”

The new baby reached out her hand and bop mama on the nose. “you got me!” “ehhh!”

At the zoo there was a statue of a giant Komodo dragon. The toddler went up to hit and put her hand on its head and just started talking

Ducksnax

Laundry

Take a seat. Now take another seat. No not that seat, that seat is taken. Now take that seat. Now freeze. If you’re not sitting, you’re out. Delete this email. For the rest of you, take a stand. Now take a seat. Rise up. Sit Down1. Gary, you’re out. Stand up. Go around. Sit down. Still have a seat? Good. Stand up and take your seat again. Its time to Duckstack.

Propogandocracy

Oh you like Democracy? Name every lynch mob

Utah politics runs on something called “the caucus system”. Neighborhoods vote on delegates to represent them to their representatives, and those delegates vet potential political candidates for compliance with the party platform. The delegates vote on who the party is going to run, rather than just having a big statewide vote within the party for all party members followed immediately by another big statewide vote for who to actually elect. Delegates spend weeks talking personally with each candidate and getting to know them, which lets them make personal, direct leadership decisions and offer personal, direct policy criticism. Because neighborhoods vote for who to send as delegates, populace representation stays intact, in theory.

In practice, the vast majority of the population doesn’t care about politics literally at all and just shows up to the ballot box and votes downballot for the party they generically agree with. So the delegates tend to be selected from those who are the most “tuned in”, or rather, the people who care the most. This is criticized as “extremism” and a bill (SB54) was passed to let candidates bypass the caucus system and just pay a signature collection agency to buy their way into power. Spencer Cox, for example, received over $7 Million in campaign contributions from left wing organizations such as Netflix and All-In-For-Utah, enabling him to force his way as the primary republican candidate despite his immense unpopularity within the party. The idea is to elevate uninformed voters above informed voters and call it democracy- this philosophy has been perhaps one of the most important pillars in the ongoing destruction of the Western World.

If your system does not select for people who care, then it will select for those capable of exploiting the blind spot created by lack of information. “Of course they consented- they never learned they had a choice.” Spencer Cox was able to remain governor in 2024 on a $7 Million dollar campaign. Despite this, his opponent Phil Lyman was able to secure nearly 15% of the total vote statewide, as a literal write-in candidate. That’s how unpopular Cox is.

I have always had a sixth2 sense about propaganda3- One of the things we’ve learned from Artificial Intelligence is that you can craft a convincing argument for pretty much anything, if you’re so inclined. Another thing we’ve learned from Artificial Intelligence is that it is trivially cheap to spool up artificial people and “flood the zone” with false social consensus. Democratic campaigns have been documented doing this manually for years, with entire discords devoted to artificially posting certain messages across reddit forum boards and taking shifts throughout the day commenting on them to boost the signal, or coordinating protests against ICE in Minnesota, a paramilitary insurgent operation that got several people killed. Automating all of this is becoming much cheaper. AI safety is a wicked meme but AI signatures and creation disclosures are probably one of the only true worthwhile efforts in that domain.

I’ve had a simple rule of thumb in politics for decades, and it is this: Do not trust any politician who does not operate his own twitter account. If he’s contracting some “publicity” or “image rehabilitation” agency to post for him, he should be treated as a hostile actor, an alien, and possibly even a politician. A machine can never be held accountable therefore a machine must never make a management decision.

For all of Trump’s faults4, you know exactly what he thinks about things and why, but you could never get this assurance with Joe Biden, whose entire presidency was a mystery and nobody knew who was behind any given action. Even politicians who do good things who I agree with such as Ron Desantis scare me on this count. How can democracy function if you don’t actually know who you are electing?

By circumventing the “extremists” with SB54, the moderates are making a coordinated effort to turn Utah into a blind mob where whoever can buy the most ad copy wins. This is very dangerous, when so many organizations have a vested interest in diluting or depleting the positive culture the church and Utah natives have worked for centuries to build.

Of course, lax laws and party regulations means that anyone with democrat views can register as republican, and have a marketing agency print whatever plays well with the public. This also reduces the conscience load, since you just have to consent to the marketing agency lying on your behalf, rather than you personally having to lie. Even politicians have a hard time just lying constantly. In a delegate system, you have to systematically lie to 1000+ people, all asking you different and sometimes very stupid questions.

Tracy Nutall, a career Democrat activist, recently (like 6 months ago recently) switched her party affiliation and ran for “Republican State School Board”. To do this, she had to talk to hundreds of delegates, personally, multiple times. Now, she’s been groomed her whole life for politics, being moved from liberal NGO to liberal NGO, all with respectable sounding names and extremely partisan agendas. Her campaign was well financed, with fliers and assistants and dozens of planted delegates working around the clock calling other delegates. Whenever asked about the party platform, she would just say “I’m really focused on the job, so I try not to answer questions that aren’t specifically about the education system.” This is a very workshopped answer, and despite all of her history she was able to secure about 35% of the vote.

This means about 35% of Utah’s Republican Party is composed of some mix of gullible people, civility centrists, and leftist infiltrators. But I repeat myself. 35% is a lot higher than my previous estimate of 20%, so it was a pretty interesting race to watch. But the point is that only people who really care are going to learn to see through that sort of thing- in a red state, democrats spend a lot of capital on appearing respectable, and then once they are in power they respectably and decently try to make all republicans unemployable and respectably and decently try to legalize drugs and respectably and decently try to teach all the republican four year olds about homosexual relationships. I’m still way mad about most of the cultural stuff Joe Biden did, not even counting all the policy stuff.

I’m a huge outlier here though. Normal people are totally content to be ruled by a radical leftist, as long as it doesn’t affect their life too much. They have other things to do, and things have to go pretty far for “being political” to outweigh their personal cares as a priority. For example, there’s a big extremist Nazi named Elon Musk5 who was a huge Democrat party donor until like 2 years ago when some mid-level manger banned babylon bee from twitter, and Elon realized that the party he’d belonged to all his life wasn’t going to let him play with rockets- he hates being political and really isn’t good at it. Whenever you hear the word “radicalization” you can swap it out with “someone hurt so much by politics that it became a better investment for them to get into politics than to stay out of it.” The people with something to lose are the ones who tune in and show up, and radicalization is when normal people start feeling like they have to show up. The cost of being out of tune is increasingly worse than tuning in.

The Parable of The Scorpion And The Frog

cry me a river

Once upon a time both a scorpion and a frog needed to cross a body of water. Upon agreeing on a course forward, the frog hopped on the scorpions back and they waded in, and then the scorpion drowned.

History

One kid reads books, the other is just pretending

Our toddler fell down and our son commented “you ran out of batteries and broke.”

Toddler has learned a new word, out of desperate necessity: Soda. “oohwah” she says. “You need soda?” we say. Big pouty solemn nod.

Our toddler gained a kiwi death burn this week after the kids ran away and hid with a bucket of kiwi fruits. As is often the case when eating fruit, you don’t even realize you have scrubbed all your skin off until later

We were a little worried how the toddler would adjust to no longer being the youngest child, but she drags her stuffed animals around with blankets and rocks them back and forth to burp them and tucks them into the carseat and stuff

Sportoscopes

Advising the future using your favorite sport

If your sport isn’t on this list, its because it isn’t real- you’ve been hallucinating it this whole time. Anyway:

Baseball: Your life runs in circles. Go home and re-experience childhood. Return enough and you shall reach samsara.

Football: Its a game of inches, and you’re out of measuring tape. You can’t estimate this. Fill your pockets with measuring tape

Hockey: The pokeys are coming from you. Step in and out and turn around to dodge the bullets. 3… 2….

Rugby: Your future is to be tucked in at night, snug as a bug in a rugby. Which might be a little violent now that I think about it. Wear padding.

Basketball: Your goals are within reach, if only you get height stretching surgery soon.

Tennis: Chant “I’m rubber, you’re glue, everything bounces off of me and sticks to you.”

Ducksnax

Mary

Do you ever wonder what makes us human? Is it our toes? It is not that. Take the most human thing you can think of. Error? To err is human? Are you kidding? You sound like a robot. “Error. Beep boop”. This is what you think humanity is? To robot is to human? Well, you’re entitled to your opinion, just like you’re entitled to be dancing the robot as you read this, right now. Dance the robot the entire time, even. See if I care. I’ve got a better idea. The most human thing I can think of is ducks. They’re like ideal humans- instead of our horrible waddle1, they have an elegant walk. Instead of our measly jumps, they float and they fly. Instead of our time-consuming pregnancies, they lay eggs. They’re better at chess, video games, and human pyramids. But that’s no excuse not to strive. Stop doing your robot dance and build a human pyramid right now. Someday, you might rival the noble Duck Stack.

Sadly, porn

comprehensive guide to watching pornography

Pornography is ubiquitous in society. By some estimates, more than 90% of men use it regularly. The popular religious wisdom is that this makes them absolutely unworthy of love. There is a line to walk in discussing it- because that message is actually extremely unhelpful, you don’t want people taking away the idea that its something so catastrophic that their lives are over until its dealt with. This is a will-sapping message, and it actively blocks recovery efforts. But nor do you want people coming away with the idea that its no big deal.

In Christ’s day, alcohol was fine, but in our day, alcohol is mass produced and biochemically engineered and distributed in every store with billions of flavors and I presume filled with sugar and all sorts of other compounding factors. Modern inventions like cars and drugs make alcohol’s negative consequence set massively higher than it used to be. In other words, the landscape has changed. Pornography is not about naked women anymore. It has not been about that for a very long time.

It is what is called a “hyperstimulus”, where the lizard brain is triggered and tells you you have “hit the evolutionary jackpot”, like a toddler discovering a pile of marshmallows. And like a toddler, you have basically no chance of saying no to it. You may have noticed that everyone in society is obese, and because of this there is a deluge in people seeking to justify themselves, “obese pride” and fat acceptance movements are everywhere. People will tell you to your face that it does not matter, that weight has no physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual consequences. I think this is basically an apt analogy- some people are a little overweight, some people are morbidly overweight, but how much you weigh has a direct effect on you, not just physiologically, but because how you treat your body communicates to your mind what you think about yourself, which changes how you act. Some people are just a little overweight. Some people are morbidly, morbidly overweight. Pornography usage should be considered the rough equivalent of being 50-300 lbs overweight. You are a slob, and while sometimes all that means is a sugar crash, sometimes what that means is you disgust everyone around you, who has to see you, smell you, and empathize with you. You can still be a good person, well liked and respected, friendly and charitable, despite these things. People have successful morbidly obese marriages all the time. People have fat friends. But what we’re in the business of here is promoting health. The healthier you are, the lower your chance of horrifying problems suddenly manifesting and dramatically ruining your life or killing you.

However, it should be approached delicately. Have you heard of the fish who lived in polluted water, and therefore to escape the pollution jumped out of the tank and suffocated? A lot of women are like that, as if to hope that if you react extremely enough, then a solution will “manifest”. Women in abstract are prone to performative self harm, such as cutting themselves out of the dating pool until “somebody does something”. This quickly becomes escapism and an excuse not to deal with men’s good and healthy sex drives, which they can now justify demonizing by proxy.

There are good reasons for men to seek out porn. Men are biologically wired to seek out sex, and in adult men, especially introverts, sex is almost entirely that which they use to derive their self esteem. Like basically any drug, the reason you use it is to “feel better”. No matter how destructive (i.e meth, cocaine, heroin, tylenol), drugs are effective, and living in a drugged up fantasy world really works in the short term. But it isn’t accurate to think of it like a drug- Just like any vice, you mostly do it because it is low effort, and it consistently solves the problem you’re using it to address. Same reason people go to McDonalds. Men’s sex drives are not some defect. It is, in fact, vital for society’s wellbeing and function and civilization that men want to look at women’s breasts. Just telling guys to “not like it” is not going to make the hormonal profile magically stop. Pornography use is not a mind-over-matter thing. But the ways it diverges from normal sexuality are exacerbated by our modern cultural issues.

Fewer people than ever understand male sexuality, and the parts that they do understand they tend to demonize, hence very normal things are called “porn-brained”, with the idea that if men didn’t watch porn, then they would act like women. This assumption informs nearly all “porn discourse” you see online, even when they make correct points. Real roots are traced only to their least desirable endpoints, labeled toxic masculinity, and used as justification for destroying the whole plant.

The male sex drive thrives on novelty. Men have a hook in their skull, somewhere between the eyes, and if a woman has a nice feature in a 40 meter radius it physically yanks his head towards it. Men who pretend this is not the case tend to have learned to do so almost without exception as a manipulator technique, so if a guy is performatively talking about how horrible men are, he can reliably be predicted to be some flavor of insane abusive rapist- male feminists are liars, they are untrustworthy. Not that there aren't chivalrous guys out there, but you can’t solve the men-women disparity by destroying the shadow, and you can’t lurk in it- The good path is to mature the dark sex drives past their childish baseline into something that is directed and useful. To “integrate your shadow.”, to become even more dangerous, but controlled.

Getting off porn will not prevent men from sexually objectifying women. If that’s the objective, then the solution isn’t banning porn, the solution is castrating men. Granted that’s an overarching goal of society in general anyway, but good men tend to already be ashamed of their libidos. They already know women are uncomfortable, so porn becomes in their minds either a dirty weakness- something evil but which they are biologically wired to do- or a perfect solution- all the sex, without having to bother a girl with it. This especially becomes a problem in marriage when the sex drops off after kids, and the husband knows that the wife is busy and he doesn't want to be a burden on her. In our society, the modern man cannot really speak his aggressive desires without being scolded about porn brain (not even by women, just in his own mind even), so he has difficulty actualizing the patriarchal environment of a successful marriage. Running from his sex drive trains evasion, impotence, and of course masturbation, which he then continues to practice in fractal forms the mundane parts of his life, job, and family. A great deal of the problem can be alleviated by sexual honesty, or perhaps sexual negotiation would be a better term. Women shouldn't be expected to approve of or tolerate every insane porn derived microfetish from their husbands, but nor can it be demonized. Sex is literally one of the only ways your husband knows you love him.

One of men’s major psychological weaknesses is self-knowledge, which compounds the issue. Men don’t even know what they want, let alone know how to articulate it, let alone have enough drive to express it out loud. Porn use lowers testosterone too. Because of course it does. So not only are the women sold a fantasy land homosexual k-pop idea of men’s sexuality, men are massively unable to clarify otherwise, and when they do women are pre-emptively inoculated against understanding by calling it toxic or porn brained or a dozen of other pseudopsychological thought-stopping terms.

Sometimes the wife will try to “help” the man reduce his porn habit by “being available”, which sounds like a correct solution in theory, but is actually tragically mistaken. With a correct understanding of man’s sexuality, “being available” is actually emasculating to the husband, because you’re sort of implying that what sex means to you is “just something you have to deal with once in a while.” Which is obviously true sometimes but what men actually want is for you to actually be into him. Maybe some men are so deprived they will appreciate your noble self-sacrifice of allowing him to beg you for sex, and some women are hot enough that this works, but as a trend over time he’s going to sense your motives in relation to the thing he really cares about and adjust his perception of the marriage accordingly. If sex is just him masturbating either way he might as well save you the trouble. That’s what he’s going to think.

Porn can be abusive, and it can teach abuse, and a lot of the women in porn are being trafficked, but this is not a good argument against porn because it misses the big holistic picture which I’m outlining here. If the problem with porn is abuse then the logical response is “oh okay we just need ethically sourced grass fed prostitution”. This philosophy led to OnlyFans and it turns out “women end up trafficked” happens for a reason. Basically every e-prostitute has a “manager” (pimp) doling them out2, as a matter of optimization. Its impossible for women to not get trafficked. Just as porn fries a man’s dopamine receptors, so that continuous novelty escalation is needed to feel excitement, promiscuity fries a woman’s stability receptors, making her require crazy escalations like choking and getting called mean names to even feel wanted. There is no “grass fed” prostitution, its all abusive, but that’s the problem with pornographers, not the problem with porn. The problem with porn is its habits.

Many men at this point, willing to justify themselves, go: “But what about women reading erotica? The most popular women’s novels of all time are filled with explicit BDSM sex scenes. Boddice rippers (or whatever the kids are calling them these days) flood the market!” but go by consequences. It really isn’t the same thing. Yes they read romances with sex scenes in them, but it’s not really the same as how guys “use” porn as a stress relief or whatever. I have no desire to absolutize sins. Some things are worse when men do it. Some things are worse when women do it. If you want a “girl equivalent of porn” in terms of motivations, consequences, and so on, its going to be something like going to therapy or getting a lot of orbitersfollowers on social media. This is also probably a good framework for putting into context “what porn is to men” rather than thinking about it like him just going out and eating a bunch of poison for no reason. Men aren’t forming relationships with their porn any more than women do with their therapists, i.e. you know it isn’t “real”, but there is an intellectual function, you hope it will solve problems, its a useful escape, and so on. A lot of men use porn not because they are horny, but because they are not horny and want to get horny because they feel lifeless and trapped and when you’re horny you’re motivated to achieve things in life. As I understand it women see therapists in much the same way, especially in the validation aspect. Porn and therapists and simps won’t do '“exactly what you want them to” but it definitely makes it its mission to try- a level of enthusiasm unmatchable in the real world.

Which leads into the rather extensive array of pornography’s other “side effects”. Like any drug, some people get hit by the side effects hard, and some people only experience a few, or mild and manageable ones. Sometimes through some quirk you get an anti-side effect, or even an anti-side effect that has positive consequences. But pornography is not some one-time drug, it is a habit with actual pleasure-based reinforcement loops. Society indulges this on a massive scale, so even mild personal consequences will compound, culturally. You’re going to get hit by something:

• Pornography changes a man’s hormonal cycles. Gradually, porn use is required to self regulate, both emotionally and physically and so on.

• Pornography’s extensive development of sexual fetishes renders a person increasingly incompatible with partners. There’s so much variety a porn user can constantly try new things, forever.

• Pornography creates a “dual sexuality” conditioning. After prolonged use, many users are no longer aroused by real sexuality.

• Pornography obviates the drive to find a mate, and reduces the drive to keep good relations with one’s spouse. “Why would I seek, when I am satisfied?”

• Pornography does promote unrealistic beauty standards. Users have no incentive to keep their tastes from constantly spiraling up to completely unattainable levels.

• Pornography use divorces sexuality from relationships.

• Pornography remaps a person’s template from “person-based” to “scenes-based”. The skit and environment become what is arousing.

• Vulgarity indulged over time destroys one’s sense of the sacred.

• Feeling like you own an infinite harem artificially inflates men’s sense of their own social status.

• It creates the expectation of occasionally living in fantasy, lowering real world endurance

• Pornography use trashes one’s sense of contextuality. The dopamine goes directly in, free of cause and effect.

• Pornography creates unrealistic sexual standards (this is different from unrealistic beauty standards. Think things like “how arousal works in relationships, how emotional states influence marital intimacy”, etc)

• Cripples ability to understand symbolism. Pornography is hyper-literal, often more literal than literal. Emotions and vocalizations are explicit and autistic to make watching it take the least intellectual energy possible.

• Pornography takes little effort, leaving users unprepared for real world payoff dynamics.

• Pornography teaches disloyalty.

• Pornography desensitizes to both beauty and ugliness. Utopic stimulus levels can render everything grey. Sometimes if the plot is right men will still still make themselves get off on it, even if its ugly or otherwise objectionable.

• Pornography consumption helps fund pornography distribution, which does target minors, explicitly. Youthful impressionability and high hormones compounds all of the effects.

• Porn drives relationship dysfunctions such as the Madonna-Whore complex, where a man is unable to be aroused by a woman they respect. The man wants a woman converted to him body+soul but society says respect women, so the man goes to the pornographic woman, who he doesn’t have to ask to serve him.

• Porn promotes a “sign seeking” religious mindset. It directly lowers the ability to exercise faith through effort: (mathew 16:4)

• Women feel pressured to act in unnatural/pornographic ways, some of which are very artificial. It can drive eating disorders like anorexia and so on.

• Porn use increases acceptance of homosexuality, transexuality, and other lifestyles with major real-world organizations and consequences. Pornhub and other websites have testified that they specifically try to drive people to gay porn in order to promote acceptance.

• Porn use conditions conditioning- vices tend to go together. Smokers always smoke with coffee or alcohol. If you’re used to depending on something, depending on something else isn’t a leap.

• Pornography lowers self discipline, and worse, teaches against it.

• Pornography can block the natural decrease in libido that comes with age, causing increased friction in marriages after the wife hits menopause.

• Because pornography drives fetish development, men become less able to notice and gauge suitable marriage candidates. The things their body is conditioned to think are good do not map at all to real world women’s attributes. It skews sexual selectors towards “sexual compatibility” over more long-lasting attributes.

• Pornography decreases testosterone.

• Pornography exacerbates marriage issues which end in divorce, which has drastic repercussions in children.

• Pornography primes homosexuals and transgenders. It is very, very difficult to unwire sexuality especially after years of imprinting via orgasm, which gives many the impression they are born this way, when in fact they were merely predisposed, similar to genes for alcoholism.

• Pornography usage can dramatically increase objectification of women (beyond what is reasonable)

• Pornography users experience decreasing returns, especially men who are driven by novelty. This can create an escalation loop- nearly all child predators testify that they “started” with regular, vanilla porn.

• Porn sites have content algorithms to keep you engaged and scrolling. Imagine your facebook timeline, except instead of baiting you with outrage content that’s bad on purpose to make you click, you’re just giving it root access to your sexuality.

• Pornography reduces women’s need to be high quality or competitive- because men are already having “quality, imaginary sex” women can slack off or indulge in numerous vices that normally would become major friction points.

• Pornography can condition “drag and drop” sexuality, giving young men weird ideas about flirting and women’s needs (for example, not expecting women to need to be warmed up first.)

• Pornography can decrease libido, causing the man’s wife to get less sex than she wants, because he’s already taken care of it.

That’s a short list, mostly male focused because, like I said, I don’t think it really affects women the same way. When women read erotica, they usually don’t even masturbate. Its often an almost academic exercise- they’re still going to get negative effects because, come on, there’s insane stuff out there, but its obviously not the same. Anyway I’ve more studied this in men, so it is men’s consequences I speak to.

I do not like when women lecture about pornography consumption. It feels very much like a power grab to me rather than promoting health- like they can't just say "I want people to be nice to me" or whatever it has to be "everyone who isn't nice to me is on PORN”, there’s the inherent put-down angle, always painting the men who do it as low status. It isn’t helpful, it isn’t accurate, and often it is outright insulting in a blatant self-serving sort of way. I remember listening to a speech about how men need to “rise up” and “get off porn” because “women need them to be men”, all of this is true but how motivated do you think men are to get off porn and get to serving women? That’s it? Porn is preventing you from serving women? Its interfering with your subservience? This is a doctrine of self negation. Annihilationist. Are you sure the message you want to go with is that the men watching porn are taking the only life path that offers actual gratification? “Imagine if a woman liked you. Now imagine her scolding you. Just the thought of women should actually be a turn off.” Is that what “being a man” means?

The honest way for women to talk about pornography would be just to talk about their personal experiences, their own feelings. Using the “I” pronoun rather than to place the impetus on other people through the passive voice of assumption. This follows the basic rules of respect, which is taking people as they are, and allowing them room to choose what you disagree with, rather than trying to manipulate them through condescension and reputation. In fact scolding men about pornography is such a successful route to social power that you will often see large articles on the subject written by actual prostitutes, or “Christian” women who also happen to constantly post a lot of very carefully cropped cleavage shots. This somehow doesn’t detract from their message at all because the status gain is the point, and pornography and its consequences are totally irrelevant apart from its social reputation among their audience. The more outspoken a woman is about pornography in public, the more I suspect her of not even knowing or caring what pornography is- its a pure symbol. Men have long learned that women do not have anything even close to men’s best interests at heart.

Prey will not tell predators how best to trap them. If a woman was giving serious good advice openly, it would open herself to manipulation by malicious actors. Simple risk evaluation. Economics. So advice from women almost universally takes the “civilizing the savages” route, make men more safe for “women generally”, which most boys notice at about age 13 doesn’t actually make them more attractive to women. And it definitely doesn’t make them more capable. Its not really a different phenomenon than when some random woman in a store starts lecturing you like she’s your mom. Any boy with a brain (or more importantly, a soul) is going to ask “what’s in it for me?” and the answer is always “literally nothing, just give me what I want.” In other words dating advice from women to men is usually more like “being mugged” than “being helped”. Its the difference between trying to help someone climb a mountain and trying to remold them in your own image. The importance of purity of motive is brought into no sharper focus than when giving unsolicited advice.

It isn’t wrong to want to surround yourself with beauty, to want to be freely selfish and want to feel indulged by someone. These are the drives behind pornography. I’m not convinced its even wrong to want to read or skit or “game it out”. But its playing with fire, and the entire world is covered in lava. Understanding and seeing our situation in a clearheaded light is the first step to improving it.

Skittlescopes

Flavorful candy horoscopes

Just how fruity are you? The stars have spoken:

Red Skittle: Pleasant and sweet, crunchy at first but then chewy

Blue Skittle: Pleasant and sweet, crunchy at first but then chewy

Green Skittle: Pleasant and sweet, crunchy at first but then chewy

Orange Skittle: Pleasant and sweet, crunchy at first but then chewy

Black Skittle: Pleasant and sweet, crunchy at first but then chewy

Limited Edition White Skittle: Pleasant and sweet, crunchy at first but then chewy

The Story Of Thor’s Hammer, Mjolignier

Some Greek mythology for ya

Thor was a spritely boy living in valhalla or middle Earth. One day, Thor went to eat breakfast, and Zeus came by for breakfast. His mom made everybody giant hammer shaped pancakes. Thor stuck his fork in them, and Zeus stuck his fork in them, and Zeus couldn’t lift it, but Thor could. So Thor ate his hammer, which he named mjolrnir. Zeus was so impressed at thors strength even in boyhood that he gifted him lightning. But then Thor’s evil stepmother came, who was a witch, and she cursed him to only be able to use lightning with his hammer. “That’s fine”, Thor smugly told her. “I’ve got a spare.” At that very moment, Thor’s mother handed him another hammer of pancakes, which he lifted up and bonked the stepmother on the head with, electrifying her. And so, Thor and Zeus saved the day, and got delicious pancakes doing it. The end

THE UNO REVERSE SECTION

oh no!

You have reached the uno reverse section. Now you have to start reading BACKWARDS, UP the duckstack.

History

news from our family

I told you all last week about the birth of our new daughter. She says m,kki.

The kids love holding the baby. It terrifies us

Our son stuck his chin on the burning pan for some reason

I have learned that I probably should start ordering child locks as a subscription service. Every few months there’s something new that the kids SHOULDN’T GET INTO. This week it was blankets. Hundreds of them. Again.

My wife was reading a picture book about Shadrack, Mashiach, and Abednego, and it said “Will the boys pray to the idol? No they won’t.” So now our son thinks only girls pray to idols

Duckstack Science Corner: Tension

Learning with archery

There’s a lot of substances in the universe, and they are all stretchy. Some are stretchier than others though. A rock is only mildly stretchy, but something like your skin is extremely stretchy. Forget about skin though, because we’ve got here a string and some wood. *TWANG*. As you can see, the wood stretches around, and the string holds it that way, and then when you pull on the string it stretches the wood. One property of stretchiness is that stretchy things try to unstretch themselves, for example skin. That unstretching is called “Newtons”, and its what launches this arrow. *TWANG* sorry Braxton, I didn’t see you there. You can calculate Newtons by how many muscles you use pulling the bowstring back. Just a little and the arrow only flies a short distance. Pull back a lot and the arrow goes much farther. *TWANG* Sorry Braxton, I didn’t see you again. Scoot to the side will you? Yes you can go to the nurse after this. Now, the stretched out bow wood stores those Newtons in it like a bank, and it releases them into everything around it when its given the freedom to unstretch. Picture a toddler throwing a temper tantrum. Since the string is really the only place for those Newtons to go, they climb onto this arrow, and shoot it right off into the distance. It imparts its Newtons to the target, so that it can stop stretching, and the target stretches and tries to unstretch back against the arrow, and pretty soon you’ve got equilibrium. No, Newtons is not blood. Anyway, once you master physics, archery is pretty easy. *TWANG*. Sorry Ms Soursworth! Heh. That’s the thing about science. You’re always discovering new frontiers.

Ducksnax

Waterslide

You stand on the shoulders of giants. Giant ducks, to be exact. If you didn’t know this, it means you need to pay more attention. I know what you’re thinking: “I’m paying as much attention as I can, but I don’t see any giant ducks.” This is the problem with faithlessness. You need to perceive the ducks with your spiritual eyes. The carpet beneath your feet is symbolic of duck feathers. The pavement outside is solid like flippers. The giant duck you are standing on itself stands upon giant ducks of its own. That’s why we called our newsletter The Duckstack- its to draw attention to this eternal truth.

Environmental Advisory: Moonshine

This isn’t your grandmother’s soda pop

There exists an illegal beverage called moonshine, created in secret by barbarians and savages. Its effects are eldritch, and its taste is violent and strange. Forbidden in all cultures and by all peoples, it is spoken of in hushed tones. We urge you to write your congressman and request he take stronger action against this harmful substance.

Its carbonated milk

Realpolitik

On Loving Your Enemies

The average, modal leftist, thinks the assassination of Charlie Kirk was a good thing. That’s kind of the table stakes we’re dealing with. Curtis Yarvin once pointed out that if witches were actually real, witch hunting would not be nearly so popular due to the grisly magical demise most would almost certainly be fated to reach, and the same goes for “Nazis” and “Fascism”. If the political Right was half the fascists the left wanted them to be, insurrectionist judges would have been locked away and the country fixed long ago. The immensely politically popular DOGE effort to reduce waste and fraud in the government was sued, overturned, and as far as I know all of those kids are now on trial to go to prison because there is no legal solution to insane leftist judges. The videos of them being deposed are heartbreaking. A government funded antifa contingent personally sought out and doxxed and fired multiple of my friends in Utah and elsewhere over their support of the family proclamation just a few years ago. And now leftists are just openly shooting at RW public figures with unsurprising regularity. So it can be understandable that tempers are running “a little hot” so to speak. There is no appetite for peacemaking.

And people are becoming more and more aware of the phenomenon of “Suicidal Empathy”, in other words willful blindness to the consequences of mercy. Increasingly, the heuristic all operate under is “Nothing bad can happen when you are being kind.” Societal social rules have gained the bent nearly exclusively of the moral framework needed to govern kindergarteners; when you’re teaching a bunch of kids, none of the conflicts matter, and so avoiding conflict overrides basically everything as the highest priority. The slogans plastered about a schoolroom are taken unironically as apex morality- “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything.” “don’t judge.” “bullying is wrong” “keep your hands to yourself.” “Always share.” These morals are very easy to conflate with Christianity, because they use a lot of the same words, but the words mean different things.

The rules that govern a kindergarten are great for harmony, but terrible for building things. Harmony has an important place, but as our church’s prophet recently taught, “The covenants we have made inevitably position us as devoted participants in the eternal contest between truth and error.” His examples of being a “peacemaker” demanded actively inserting oneself in other’s troubles- whether those troubles were their sins, or their marriages, or more benign matters. The logistical issue is that peacemaking relies on someone else coming to the table, something that happens in maybe 1% of cases. If someone doesn’t want to repent, or civilize, there’s not a lot you can do to force them. Enemies are real. Or as a different prophet of our church put it, if you don’t have enemies, you aren’t living the gospel right.

But is everyone an enemy who is not a friend? What we see among the right wing is undoubtably a self-defense reaction to progressivism. There’s no appetite for hearing it but that pendulum can swing too far. And its understandable- you’re under attack, you can’t afford to set the table for your enemies. The Book of Mormon talks about this. But the fact is that even within countries undoubtably at war, most of the actual citizenry doesn’t even care. The way a group behaves is not necessarily how the individual behaves. Setting the plate for your enemies to stab you with is suicidal empathy. But if you set the table for no-one, you’ll never make friends, or do any good in the world. Though it has a different consequence set, suicidal antipathy comes with plenty of drawbacks of its own. I can’t speak for other churches, but in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints our goal is something higher, between the two.

1The Book of Mormon spends about 250 pages talking about war and war tactics, the movement of armies, numbers slaughtered, and military fortifications. Most people who haven’t read the book do not know this, and you would certainly never know it from looking at our religion from the outside. However, what you find in the written history the book contains is that over and over again the righteous combatants try to come to an accord with their enemies before they (or God) brutally slaughter them. It goes quite out of its way to mention this. If you don’t at least extend an offer of peace, God won’t hold you guiltless. The Book of Mormon talks about this tons.

If you will permit me a moment of racism, I think I can illustrate why this would be the case. Why mercy towards even enemies would sometimes be a good idea, even though it sounds insane on its face and we can observe cities literally burning around us upon the same principle.

At least in fairly recent history, most of the first world civilizations in the world were created by white conquerors who also happened to be extremely xenophilic. Third world countries are not exclusively but are usually dominated by excessive, retarded tribalism. Picture Native Americans sending their braves out to rape a rival tribeswoman as a mandatory coming-of-age ritual. Which is a fairly tame example of what Native Americans generally were like.

Remember this guy in the Pocahontas movie? The real story behind this life was that people were starving and he caught a couple Indians making trouble in their settlement. He released them back to their tribe as a gesture of goodwill, with a message asking if they could trade for food. The Indians said “sure” and when he showed up to trade they ambushed him, stole all the stuff, killed all of his men, then they tied him to a post and their women peeled all of his skin off with mollusk shells while slow roasting him alive2. Then all the historians mocked him for being naive and too generous and he was remembered as a total idiot until Disney rehabilitated his image.

So “empathy” can easily go catastrophically wrong. But what happens when you are a generous idiot is that people are able to be less guarded around you, and therefore they are able to be (selectively) generous idiots themselves. This does not mandate, but does create the necessary conditions for, a social phenomenon called “cooperation.”

No one person can do everything. To put a rocket on the moon you need engineers, welders, programmers, physicians, coordinators, bookkeepers, and dozens of other niche skillsets none of which are possible when you have to selfishly hoard every resource you come across. If you only have engineers and your rivals only have programmers, sharing without guarantees just makes you weaker. You can do a contract, a businesslike trade, to get around this, but the absolute ideal scenario is that cooperation is baked into the fundamental fabric of both of your cultures. “Of course I will share my engineer, if I need a programmer of course they’d send me one.” Marriage works this way too. Happy marriages are naturally selfless towards each other. Call it a United Order.

People try to artificially recreate this environment with kindergarten morals, usually by coercion. Wishing is important to set goals, but not on behalf of other people! “You need to give me your programmers. Then I’ll know its safe to send you an engineer” Rather than sending over an engineer for free, with no expectations, to set reciprocity as a culture. This almost always happens because not doing so exposes you to the risk of getting stabbed in the back but it also allows actual thieves to hijack your ideology to try to coerce handouts from the gullible with no intention of reciprocating. I heard once that a big reason the handshake was developed was to demonstrate to someone that you were not holding a weapon. Someone has to take the buck first.

This is basically the only way to build up a commons. We all like commons because we all benefit from it. But we don’t like paying taxes. However, Americans know that getting taxed is a lot easier when you have representation. Meaning you know the commons exists for you. These principles are unraveling because modern people, especially right wing modern people, no longer have such guarantees, and have been laboring for years in hopes of a theoretical commons which never came.

Take the immigration issue for example. We can think of hundreds of examples of Americans getting along excellently with specific people of all races and nations, and yet a campaign of explicit mass deportations won Trump the first Republican popular vote in 20 years. What’s going on? America has absurdly high immigration, but absolutely no assimilation. The foreigners bring their cultures, their ethnic feuds, their social norms, and then publicly spit on their hosts as inferior. America is treated as a global economic zone rather than a country- its inhabitants in a fiscal sense treated as existing entirely to provide resources for the third world. Immigrants send their paychecks home, with some economies of countries such as Mexico and India being propped up almost entirely by remittance money. Civil rights law is used exclusively to prevent white males from getting lucrative jobs. Ethnic conclaves of explicitly racial activists constantly lobby government officers for explicitly racial concessions, whilst suing into oblivion any white person who tries to do something similar. In short, dispossession. People are right to be angry. Christ warned about this scenario multiple times in multiple places, stating that such dispossession invites violent backlash.

The liberal sin is to act as though none of this is the case. You can theoretically have something in common with someone who chants death to your country. “A violent, mentally ill felon is a nuclear physicist just waiting for his chance.” Some degree of LARPing is necessary to achieve miracles, but acting as though cooperation has already happened, as though mutual understanding has already been achieved, this sets us up for trouble. It is demanded that we treat all groups as equals when we are not, rather than as potential equals whom we hope will rise to join us as brothers. For all the leftist talk about racism and other isms, it has always felt to me like this is the only grounds on which true charity can be extended. The love of a parent for their children does not exclude treating the children as individuals, nor demand ignoring their vices.

I don’t think being a peacemaker requires pretending you aren’t at war. But being at war doesn’t mean you’re constantly fighting either. Not if you’re smart. You’re mistaking war for genocidally, which is against the gospel generally speaking. During wartime you make attacks on specific objectives, and you try your best to avoid hitting civilians and noncombatants because you aren’t a savage. You even mid-war negotiate prisoner exchanges and all sorts of mini-treaties. In most cases being simple trading partners is better than war, because collateral damage is a fact of violence, both to infrastructure, in spending your own resources, and in the accidents inherent to using force. Suicidal antipathy says “always fight, everywhere”. All this does is mark you as a feral beast that’s a possible danger even to sympathetic onlookers and allies no matter how just your grievances. It is entirely possible to negotiate someone’s removal from your property whilst being cordial, or even sending them away with gifts. Its normal hospitality when someone comes into your home even. The savior doesn’t want us to die or live in untruth, but neither does he want us genocidal or frenzied. His goal is the salvation of all mankind, and if you’re going to be on his errand, something I have covenanted to do, its on us to do his work, where we can.

Good fences make good neighbors. Being wise as serpents means hide your teeth.

HOW GRASS WORKS

It doesn’t have the protestant work ethic, I’ll tell you that much

Grass is probably the most famous mushroom in the world. Like the quaking aspen3, grass develops a shared root system underneath your lawn, wherein it communicates with each other things like “I am being stepped on” and “the bugs are beautiful today”. Healthy grass has a beautiful green coloration, to ward off predators. It does the opposite of this. When grass dies it returns to its natural tan, symbolic of the barren desert and the scorching sun whose coloration it had been storing up all its life, to be released in that moment. Grass, like people, grows upwards, and like people, it is normal to cut it shorter with industrial sawblades. Grass are, evolutionarily speaking, our closest mushroom cousins.

Grass is highly empathetic. If someone gets hurt next to it it says “oh no” to its neighbors, but does nothing due to its inability to move. This leads to an existence full of helpless horror, but grass is an optimist. Grass and houses have a symbiotic relationship. When the grass breathes, it cools the house down, and when the house breathes, the grass gains insight into human nature. Grass’s natural enemy is the sky.

History - New Duckling

fresh from IFA or wherever

The bobdaduck family is pleased to welcome an addition in our newest daughter. She is human and makes noises like “eh” and “rrrrr”. But more like, guttural. She will have a lot to contribute to The Duckstack in the coming months, and I’ve assigned her to the typewriter mines.

We had the opportunity to go to a child’s birthday party where there were horses, and our kids got to ride them. Our toddler enjoyed it in quiet contemplation, a soft pleased look on her face. Our son stuck his arms out airplane mode the moment we stuck him in the saddle.

Before the baby was born, our son asked who was going to be the dad. We told him “No, papas gonna be the dad.” And he looked at us like we were stupid. “Papas already a dad.”

He asked us today “is <baby’s name> a children?”

I was giving the toddler kisses and she rolled over and said “owie”

The toddler is becoming more aggressive towards her brother, and while he is playful too rough sometimes, he doesn’t have a malicious bone in his body. So when she comes up to him and hits him he just sadly takes it. To our horror, she has taken up biting, and I walked in the other day to discover her gnawing on his head like some kind of zombie

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I don’t know who this guy is. He just walked into the studio4

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Accelleration

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Well that was embarrassing. You still with me? Good. We’ve got some engineers on fixing that old thing but the button to turn it off is located inside the track for some reason so basically we just keep launching ducks down the tube and hoping they bonk it by accident. Well, that’s quantum email for you. All new tech has its quirks! Gregory, feed it a few more scientists next time

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Wirehead Heaven

Marriage Doctrine2 and playing with blocks

Latter-Day Saints have a special hymn with a special line:

In the heav’ns are parents single?
No, the thought makes reason stare!
Truth is reason; truth eternal
Tells me I’ve a mother there.

-O My Father
🔗Stylized Performance

This is what Creedal Christians would call a “mystery3”, a term Christians use to refer to divine truths and sacred realities that are partially hidden from human understanding but revealed through faith, scripture, and sacraments. The idea of a Heavenly Mother is abhorrent to Thomistic Theists who root God’s sovereignty as dependent on him existing outside of reality, but it nevertheless fundamentally shapes how we as saints approach our understanding of the world.

Christians, in my observation, usually find themselves split in two worlds- the distasteful, fleshy one, and the promised spiritual heaven to come, a heaven without the icky necessities like eating, working, and all those other consequences of Adam partaking of the fruit. Christians claim marriage and such things are good things, but they also declare that God could never have any part in them, that marriage is basically a symbol, an icky accident of mortality that God instituted marriage to deal with but which is fundamentally inferior to being a Eunuch. Because Christ told the Sadducees that there is no “marrying” in the resurrection, the vast majority of Christians simply believe families are going to terminate in the afterlife, and that you will be okay with this because you’ll be so drugged out by heaven’s heaven-ness that mortal concerns won’t matter. This is basically where the caricature heaven of sitting on clouds playing harps comes from. Eastern Orthodox probably have the most radical view which is that the marriage doesn’t “dissolve” it just gets “upgraded” into dissolution, sort of the same way the Law of Moses demanded cow sacrifice but once Christ was offered as the ultimate sacrifice its unnecessary because everything just points back to him.

I hope Ronald Reagan4 doesn’t kill me for saying this, but marriage is good. I think everyone who thinks about it comes to this conclusion, but the theological question is whether God is preparing us for a next life which is wholly unlike this current life. I would say that Christ was not known for giving direct answers to trick questions, and Levirate marriage is of course not the same as what Latter-Day Saints call “sealing” or “eternal marriage”. A Levirate marriage is when according to the Old Testament commandment, a man marries his brother’s widow to have children in his brother’s name. Basically she’s still married to the first husband, which is kind of obvious from the scripture really. They aren’t “marrying” her in the same sense the first husband did. Latter-Day Saints affirm that the unmarried will be angels in the eternities, but we deny that this is God’s will.

Christ gave his apostles the authority to “bind on earth, and that same shall be bound in heaven.” There are not a lot of things this could be referring to. However, the historical record is fairly clear that this authority was not passed on. Without apostles, the church could no longer bind things in heaven, so it makes perfect sense to Latter-Day Saints that other churches perform marriages not for eternity, but “until death do you part.”

Latter-Day Saints believe Heavenly Father was once a mortal man, like Jesus Christ. And like Jesus Christ, perhaps the Father also appeared to a special woman whom he had to inform he had “not yet ascended”. I don’t know if Christ married in his mortal life, though I am personally partial to the idea that it would have been the groom’s responsibility to provide the wine at his own wedding feast, and that to be a Rabbi you had to be married, and that like baptism, Christ would have been married “to fulfill all righteousness”. For God had said: It is not good for man to be alone. Its whatever though, right? Unless you, for some reason, have a vested interest in God not partaking in marriage or sex- because you implicitly believe both to be unclean and impure practices.

Many would say that they do value marriage, but at least from the outside its hard to buy it. Not that they mean to devalue marriage, but it seems to be sort of inherent to the theology- What you think God is represents the ideal state, so the closer you get to that ideal state the more righteous you’re being. I’m not sure how much this intuitively affects people, but certainly some of these institutions force their most devout members to choose between marriage and the priesthood, and the ones that don’t, don’t seem to have a cohesive framework for fitting sex into their theology. In the Bible belt, I sat with hundreds of couples who described themselves as “living in sin”, meaning fornicating. Most Christians do not care about sex outside of marriage at all, and I suggest the reason for this is that they kind of think sex is a mortal foible like overeating, and isn’t going to be relevant in heaven, which is sometimes, despite everything Jesus did to prove the point, nevertheless visualized as basically unbodied.

Therefore, Christians were unable to mount a strong theological defense when gay marriage activism became ascendant. Common Christian arguments became an object of outright scorn for atheists and liberals- “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” and so on. “God says” is about as compelling as “Allah says” or “Krishna says”, even to most Christians, that’s just the practical reality. Without a theological framework explaining it, Christians were left with no real recourse except dogmatism, which leftists are frankly much better at. Tack on a little faux-christian doctrine about tolerance and love and the nation never stood a chance.

So Latter-Day Saints are set apart. Our doctrine mandates marriage (including the sex part) as not just an optional part of life, but a necessary requirement for exaltation, and without it a person’s spiritual advancement dead ends completely:

“Therefore, when they are out of the world they neither marry nor are given in marriage; but are appointed angels in heaven, which angels are ministering servants, to minister for those who are worthy of a far more, and an exceeding, and an eternal weight of glory.”

Doctrine and Covenants, Section 132, verse 15

Its a vision of heaven that is the best of this life, perfected. As you might expect, this cascades into family stability, with Utah and Idaho leading the nation in things like share of teenagers living with married parents and fertility rates. All of this is alien doctrine to my Christian brothers so let me return to the Bible. What does it mean to be made in God’s image?

There’s many ways to decide what scripture means. I rank “God personally telling you what he meant” in the number one slot, but immediately after that I like to use a heuristic called “letting scripture interpret scripture”5.

And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness, after his image; and called his name Seth

-Genesis 5:3

The wording is identical.

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.

-Genesis 1:26

A common scripture Joseph Smith used on this point is John 5:19:

Then answered Jesus and said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise.
-John 5:1967

God can and does choose a lot of titles to be known by, but the one we’re commanded to use when talking to him is “Father”. Because, Christ said, he’s not just Christ’s Father, he’s our Father too. In this way, Latter-Day Saints don’t have to choose between navigating flesh and navigating the spiritual- as our scripture says, “All things unto me are spiritual”. We collapse the bridge. In everything you do, your spirituality is a part of it. Latter-Day Saints who internalize these doctrines can’t “compartmentalize” their religion. It has to be who you are, both in church and in coding at a computer. It doesn’t solve all our problems, of course, but it gives a big head start, because its obvious from the outset that all the commandments God has given us have a point. When you understand the point, then its easy to obey, but I think Latter-Day Saints often take this for granted. We’re really blessed in dozens of different ways, even down to our understanding of our place in the world. Its hard to quantify how many head starts we get by default, but we often don’t capitalize on it. When we don’t emphasize the things that make us special, then our people start to become subject to the same destructive trends taking place worldwide.

It isn’t, to my observation, hitting us nearly as hard as its hitting the gentiles. Among church-going members, our TFR hovers around 3.0, and while I haven’t found data for temple divorce rates (the last data I saw was very good, like 90%, but that was from decades ago) I can definitely see that among my friends a good portion of the marriages that fail were outside the church. We aren’t Amish, Latter-Day Saints live “in the world” in the same feminist divorce apocalypse culture as everyone else, so it does affect us- but we also have some natural shielding. Like the Book of Mormon tells us, we can be grateful for Zion, but we can’t say all is well in it. God has commanded us to work.

Liquoroscopes

Today’s horoscopes are based on your favorite alcohol.

Disclaimer: I am a Latter-Day Saint and have never had alcohol.

Beer: idk

Vodka: idk

Whisky: idk

Wine: idk

Tequilla: idk

Rum: idk

Sake: idk

History

With great independence comes great responsibility. For the parent. To clean up the little independent’s messes.

The Church’s “General Conference” was this weekend. 8 hours of talks spread out across Saturday and Sunday and I’m going to have to relisten to all of it because kids are HIGH MAINTAINANCE. There was a talk about how divorce is bad, a talk about crying repentance without vitriol, a talk about removing rocks from backpacks, and a talk about the Japanese concept of Kaisen, which roughly translates to “being Japanese” and how that results in a functional airport. Cool stuff but I’ll need to reingest it to really meditate on anything

The kids are old enough we can let them outside a little bit. We’ve got a sort of netted tire swing and the kids were taking turns pushing each other on it. Our son would push the girl and say “blast off!”, and then he’d hop on and she would push him. She would yell “ba off!” and throw her arms out all excited after pushing him like 2 centimeters (her body’s current limit)

I was exhausted and trying to sleep, and my son comes in and says “can you read this?” and puts a book up my right nostril. I told him “no… I will die.” And he looked at me like I was stupid and said “No. Only womens die. When they are going uphill!” So its good to know he’s been paying attention on his walks with mama

blanket apocalypse

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Our scientists are pleased to announce this new reality bending tech

Most people are surrounded by paper8, filled with entities called letters, watching you. But you can’t fight something you can’t see. We’ve invented something called a pen, with which you can draw the invisible letters out, by inking them. Get those invisibles. Decode their secrets. Protect your family. All of this and more, with: Pen

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Poker

8

Ever wonder how easter eggs are made? People think its an easter bunny, but that’s actually a myth. Bunnies are reptiles, and do not lay eggs.

Instead, there is a global easter duck farm located in Ohio, where they have easter egg production down to a science1. Imagine a column of five to six ducks, standing on each other’s shoulders. This is called an “assembly line”, and is one of the great modern inventions of the industrial era. The Easter Bunny, who was a duck, used to do all this by hand.

The Duck on top lays the egg, obviously. They don’t have conveyor belts in Ohio so they just use gravity, as a part of the core Easter philosophy “Work smarter, not harder.”2 The egg drops down, and the second duck catches it in a bucket of paint. He turns the bucket over, dumping its contents down to the third duck, who is in charge of detail work, and painting the third duck in the same color. By the end of this process, he will be coated in hundreds of layers of paint, and be basically unable to move. From there, he will be transferred as a living statue to the Easter Inc. lobby, where he will serve admirably in his or her role for the remainder of the year, at which point Duck #4 will free him or her with a chisel and give him a wad of cash for his troubles.

Duck number three paints fun patterns on the egg, using one of his own plucked feathers as a paint brush. He’ll replace this brush after each egg is finished, meaning its color will be whatever color the previous egg was, not the current egg. He then paints fun designs on it like stripes or squiggles, and drops it to Duck#4, who avoids hitting it with his chisel.

Duck #4 then drops the egg down to duck #5 for rinsing, polishing, and sandblasting. Once the egg sparkles, he drops it down to Duck#6, who is in charge of delivery. Duck #6 will then haul the egg off to Easter Island, where a crew of trucker ducks sends the egg to households across the nation. Duck #6 will then be replaced by a new duck, with Duck #5 jumping vertically and allowing the new #6 to run underneath and catch the whole stack on his3 shoulders.

Its really beautiful to watch. A marvel of design process and engineering makes this holiday a success, and most people don’t get to see the process! We hope you’ve enjoyed the glimpse you’ve gotten to peek at today, in our description of: The Duckstack

“National Debt™”

Hello, this is the national department

Rich people and poor people look at debt very differently. I am a poor person, and the poor person perspective goes something like this: Debt is negative money. The more you have the poorer you are. Interest accumulates and you end up paying massively more for everything than you would otherwise. Usury is a tool of Satan himself for upcharging goods and oppressing the poor and the impulsive. The ideal financial state to strive for is no debt. Then, you’re saving money, and you are becoming richer. Life is about paying off the debt society saddles you with almost by default for necessities, and then it is about saving.

This is not the way money works for rich people, at all.

I am not a rich person, and the rich person’s perspective takes actual skill to pull off (to a certain point anyway, after which you are so rich you are able to invest in literal garbage and still make money off it), which makes it dangerous. The rich person’s perspective goes something like this: Debt is pre-money. The more you have, the more money you are going to have. Debt lets you make investments that pay off hundredfold what you could attain only spending what you have. Usury is what makes society rich. The ideal financial state is constant debt. Assets are money making machines. Life is about building a massive criminal empire of investments and playing dungeons and dragons with their stats, merrily moving numbers from one paper to another until the end of time. All billionaires regularly declare bankruptcy and it means nothing. Elon Musk has debt.

I am a poor person, so I do not know how to transition from poor person to rich person, this is not financial advice. The point is just that once you get to a certain scale, debt becomes an asset, like any other asset. They buy it and sell it, hold it and stake it. A more “grounded” example would be taking out a 10% APR loan to buy something that appreciates 20% per year. But most debt, at this level, makes way more than 20%. If you have a bunch of shark tank investors they'll burn millions on 50 different startups, of which maybe one will survive. And that one will recoup both their investment and their loss on all the others, by like 5000% or more, like, per year. Again I don't know how to change the fluid dynamics of money from poor person type to rich person type, just know that this second type of finances does exist.

This brings us around to the national debt. So there’s a doomsday debt clock out there, which shows how many trillions of dollars America owes to (China?), which has been (Jewishly?) lending us trillions of dollars to buy missiles to point at them. If this number of dollars passes a certain threshhold, then they'll be able to declare payment due, and since we are in debt (negative money) we won't be able to pay, so the bank (of hong kong?) will repossess America from the (British?), and all businesses in the entire United States will have their signs switched from English to Mandarin. We’ll be marched off in chain gangs through the ocean to work in mines or quarries or something until the debt is paid off. This is how I was actually taught the national debt works.

The reality is as you might expect significantly more gray. As we all know, the United States is not exactly a paragon of fiscal responsibility. But people tend to get mad at Republicans over his, when the majority of U.S. debt is just going to somalian daycares. The DOGE guys were recently sued over trying to cut literally any government grants whatsoever, and all of their efforts have been unilaterally overturned. There does not appear to be anyone in the entire United States Government with the ability to stop this train. Trump cannot control who he hires let alone where money gets spent, let alone congressional republicans trying to vote anything out of existence as if such a thing is even possible.

But the U.S. takes out debt for good things too. Just a lot more rarely. Its all mixed together and for some reason all funding has to be passed as a bundle so literally nobody gets anything if you don’t fund every Democrat’s gay (literally) projects. You have to be able to tell them no. You have to refuse the bait. But there’s just enough good things4 that saying no causes normal people actual pain which is a huge problem for re-electability, even if the nominal voter claims they really want to solve the national debt. It is Not Happening.

But all these debts are in random different things. There’s not a “due date” where we have to declare bankruptcy. The problem, rather, is that as more money is introduced into the economy, when its based on nothing, even magic funny money asset debt poisons the well through something called inflation. And that’s where the actual bad stuff comes in. Inflation is, in theory, slightly more solvable than “debt, in abstract”. But because inflation is so tied to the welfare state, you basically are going to have to let people “die”, at least theoretically, in order to impact it even slightly. It doesn’t matter that basically 90% of it is fraudulent money laundering for leftists. Any solution to it will need to come from a strange angle outside the current system- hence many Right Winger’s extreme support for mass deportations. Its one of the few angles of attack that actually poses any chance of solving some of these problems at all. Increase supply by lowering demand. But that doesn’t mean mass deportations will be “free”, because curbing inflation itself will raise the price of goods. “what about the farmers” is the first line of objection from honest people. If you want serious solutions, people are going to have to be allowed to fail. Harden your heart5.

Some Everyday Objects

Your “Daily Carry”, of what should be in your pockets every morning.

bleachers, for undoing your tan

drinking fountain, modern medicine’s improvement on leeches

mug, for barfights everywhere

candy bar, for training fruity lawyers

carpet, for soothing your vehicle

magnifying glass, for compressing glass into diamonds

chewing gum, the predecessor to pac-man

footlockers, for storing your feet in

History

Big things are happening. Or little

“Cars do not drink the same things as people.” I haven’t told him about the cyborg uprising yet

“chess is tricky for parents to win. I always win.” I think you misunderstand whats happening here kiddo

“the red milk is hot and the blue milk is cold.” Good deduction. Bad accuracy.

“I’m not a triangle guy. I’m a square guy.” I have no idea how he deduced this

The toddler has taken to eating sliced apples “around the skin”, so she’ll just eat the middle and call it good. This week we took her to Grandmas, and Grandma peeled her apples for her beforehand and the toddler still just bit around the inside leaving the edge of the slice

Ducksnax

Hatch

Previous Duckstack

It was a dark and stormy night. He was working overtime, and brooding. The day had come and gone and he was a dollar short and a minute late for his latest Duckstack article. Suddenly, you, the reader, burst into the room. “writer,” you said, knowing full well that I was masquerading as a detective at the time. “You’ve got to help me. I just got your Duckstack in the inbox, and a section was missing!” I looked the reader up and down. They had always been a sharp kid. On any other night, I would have said they were going places. But this wasn’t any other night, it was tonight, here, and I was brooding about them bursting in to ask me about a missing Duckstack section.

“Alright, I’ll take your case.” I said, setting down my steaming mug of coffee, which I hadn’t drunken any of, since I was a Mormon. The mug said “I wrote an entire duckstack and all I got were words about this crappy mug” on it. It was my favorite mug. I started thinking of all the places the Duckstack section could have gone, and I let the reader know it.

“What kind of section is it. Is it a regular? History? Is it that new telephone game? Maybe something that semi makes an appearance but nobody’s seen for a while?” I thought back to the Duckstack article lying unwritten on my desk. I hadn’t checked my horoscopes lately. Did my horoscope say the reader would come and badger me tonight? Would it say that, if it weren’t the missing section? I didn’t know. I put down my coffee, again, which I had picked up to wave around for dramatic effect, spilling piping hot coffee all over the carpet, which was covered in stains. Just how I liked it. It reminded me of home.

The kid threw me a curve ball. “No, its not a regular section at all. In fact, nobody’s ever seen it before.” This reader was sharp. Too sharp for his own good. Brains like that could get you in a lot of trouble around here, if you got in with the wrong crowd.

“Alright I’ll take your case,” I told the reader. “I can tell you aren’t going to leave me alone.” I put on my trench coat, which curved around me like a warm glove, a thin layer of cloth all that separated me from the chill outside. It was like walking the knife’s edge between life and death, which was just how I liked it. Like walking a tightrope, and all the tension I had to rely on was my narrative and a prayer. And also the reader, who was very tense over the situation. “Here, read this.” I told you, handing them a copy of the latest Duckstack, hot off the typewriter in my room. I thought I could still see smoke coming off of the keys. “Lets go look for clues.”

Dead Air

They call it white noise because its not really any of the other noises

I love the feeling of dead air. I know its bad for the environment but I just can't help it. The feeling of being in an enclosed room, and the air goes stagnant as it is entrapped and begins suffocating, and sound comes in from the outside of cars or rain on the glass but its all muffled. And I do feel sad for the air but that's what it means to be on top of the food chain. I guess I’ve come to think of it like “thinning the herd”. Survival of the fittest. Making some breathing room for the other air. Nothing lives forever, right? Its the circle of life.

There’s something comforting in that, as the air settles like a blanket, packing you in nice and tight, reflecting on life and death. The air dies to make my life that much nicer. There’s nobility in that. There’s dignity. It seems to happen immediately but from experiments the air in balloons actually takes a few days to finish dying, on average. There’s a perception gap there then, when you feel like you’re all enclosed, and then a needle or a toddler comes along and sits on you or stabs you or both if the toddler has something sharp, and everything around you explodes, which seems to happen frequently. That’s also the circle of life.

Glorying in Sin

“I used to party and sleep with tons of women and drive cool cars and be rich. Don’t be like me.”

In Christianity, everyone is a sinner. This is very convenient for people who want to believe that their sins are no big deal.

All the scriptural classics are rallied to their cause. The woman taken in adultery. All have fallen short of the glory of God. He who has offended in the smallest has broken the whole of the law. Even looking after a woman to lust is adultery. As one person unironically put it to me this week, “if you kill one person, or you kill a million people, you’re a murderer either way.”

The idea here is to “level the playing field” so that people who are totally outgunned in the sinning department have a better chance of winning the war1. In Latter-Day Saint scripture, this is called “mercy robbing justice”. Joseph Smith said this is bad, because if God is not just, it means you can’t put faith in him. Most people, in their rush for mercy, forget this. The scriptures do not, when looked at plainly, say all sin is equal- they say all sin is important. This makes more sense when you understand the point of sin. What sin “is” is not necessarily what people want it to be. What is sin, why doesn’t God like sin?

You could say God is playing the long game2. This informs his perspective. You have to understand where you’re going, and unfortunately lots of people think life is a lot more like a multiple choice test than anything else, so they think the point of keeping commandments is that God is going to tally them up when you die and go “welp, you passed” or “welp, you failed”, and then chuck you bodily into heaven or hell or whatever3. Therefore, they say, sin is so you don’t get the wrong answer on the “test”, therefore, they say, all sins are equal. All that matters is the binary “you got the wrong answer”

This perspective is exclusively used for two things: Either self justification, or status climbing via dragging others down. “I’m just as good as you are, since you’re bad, or can be made to look bad.” These perspectives are totally wrong, and it is precisely for this reason that scriptures about “judging not” exist in the first place. Its not because saying you’re better than someone is bad. Its because decrying people who are actually good is bad. Motes and beams wasn’t about “everyone who criticizes is doing a worse thing than what they’re criticizing!” But we see this social stance often. Racism is a worse offense than murder! We live in a post-Christian world.

To make this work you have to invent an entirely new plane of reality where things have “spiritual” consequences, but not physical consequences. In this “spiritual world”, both lust and adultery earn you “sin points”, so “spiritually speaking” they are the same.

But you don’t live in a spiritual world. You don’t live in a world of pseudoabstractions and dreams and scorecards. You live in a physical world where idle thoughts and murder have vastly different consequence sets. And those earthly, physical consequence sets matter a lot. To level sin, you first have to deny physical life means anything. An attractive proposition, for those who hate life. No earthly judge can tell the soul by any metric other than what you do, and God promises to judge on the same basis: “The books were opened, and the dead were judged according to their works.” (Rev 20:12) And he said people would claim they did great Christianities, in his name, but they never knew him. They corrupted the message. The direction is wrong.

God is not a referee, God is our dad. “What God Wants” is our growth. On his timeline, you, personally, becoming noble and trustworthy, disciplined and competent, just and merciful, is his highest priority for your life. That’s why all sin matters- because your development is personal. What’s easy for one person might be hard for another, and letting pharisees beat their chests in the town square and say “thank God I’m not a tax collector” is bad for them, stalling out their progress. But you will notice that Christ’s criticisms of the pharisees were nearly always about hypocrisy, not compliance! “These things ye aught to have done, while not leaving the things you are currently doing undone.” (Luke 11:42)

The parable of the prodigal son is that God is glad the son came back, not that the son “Didn’t really miss out on anything and in fact he’s more righteous than his elder brother, he went on a journey and learned some things about himself and the world and now he has super deep perspective and wisdom4.” As the Father tells the resentful eldest, “you’re literally inheriting everything I have”. He doesn’t set up the prodigal as some sort of a role model. That’s because the dad knows the eldest has a ton more wisdom than the prodigal, gained from keeping the commandments, not breaking them. That’s why he’s eligible to inherit the family business. This is explicitly a metaphor for God.

Quotes Paul on the issue, “Shall we sin, that grace may abound? God forbid!” If you start setting up prostitutes and druggies and gang members and homosexuals and so on as a special class of righteous, then you have set up a system wherein the good people are actively discouraged from being good. If showing off great mercy is the name of the game, good people can never compete. Yes, you should praise their repentance. No, they did not uncover the hidden secrets of virtuous living while doing hallucinogenics5. No, they aren’t “just like you” now.

But what you will see is, for example, men being encouraged to marry women with promiscuous pasts. Or even just women who are ugly or undesirable in other ways. “God is merciful. Don’t you want to be like God?” This is, in truth, an extremely insulting thing to say. “If you were less religious, you would deserve better. You are called to self harm. The bad have a right to your wealth by virtue of their lack of virtue- and this is the virtuous perspective.” This is a losing pitch, and men, especially, are right to push back against this as the communist parasitism it is. A religion that is a simple exercise in self flagellation should be rejected, as a matter of mere course. All the other problems with it aside, you aren’t doing anything. Or learning anything. Thankfully, Jesus was not actually a Marxist6. The apostles were not promised “you’ll be really virtuous” as their reward. To oversimplify, they were promised power and judgement.

Selflessness is a virtue, but not so much of a virtue that it encompasses the definition of virtue. In the gospels, the correct targets of altruism were: Widows, and the sick. What did Christ do for the poor? He preached to them.

⁴ Jesus answered and said unto them, Go and shew John again those things which ye do hear and see:

⁵ The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them.

-Mathew 11:4-5 (emphasis added7)

Christ did not give them money.

One of Christ’s most famous miracles was to multiply bread and fishes to feed everyone who had been listening to him all day. The next day, the “multitude” exploded in size from people straight up looking for a handout. At this point, Jesus refused to feed them. I’m serious, read the full chapter. Its very enlightening.

John 6:26 Jesus answered them and said, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Ye seek me, not because ye saw the miracles, but because ye did eat of the loaves, and were filled.

[…]

66 From that time many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him.

This serves to illustrate that “being good to each other” does not mean “indulge people”, and it especially doesn’t mean “enable people in their vices.” I doubt Jesus was thinking about the sociological implications of building a church on handouts- I think he was thinking about what each soul in that crowd needed to repent of. That message is far less eagerly received than the message of grace. People love to talk about grace.

This is where we get to backhanded testimonies. People getting up and talking about what a wild sinner they used to be. People getting up and talking about their past sins in extraordinary detail. Bragging about what they have gotten away with, thanks to Jesus. Making Jesus complicit in their sins. That’s what grace means to a lot of people. They see themselves as bragging “on behalf of God”, and when your God is basically a standin for yourself, you can see how eager people are to get to the braggin’. Who wants to hear a story about a person lifting a single weight? To make God truly heroic, he’s gotta lift crazy weights. The crazier the sin, the more glorifying it must be for God to have overcome it. So the logic goes. My God can beat up your God. And so the people revel in filth, and call this “Christianity”.

I think the scriptures are fairly clear that God cares about the single feather of a sparrow, he has no need for grand gestures and “glorying”. He wants you to 1) have faith (motive power, especially re: to keep his commandments) and 2) repent (turn your heart and mind from bad courses). You can solidify those two with covenants. But the work is pretty clearly to change hearts, and that means hearts of pride, hearts of sin, hearts of bad habits, and hearts of laziness, all sorts of hearts, major and minor. Which is why the gospel practiced correctly improves every aspect of a person’s life. It does not do this by creating a pretend world where practical consequences don’t matter.

Water Bottles: A History

They used to be gourds, then they were plastic, and now they’re metal. They are evolving into cyborgs

Where did water bottles come from? They have rapidly become an invasive species. Like cockroaches, they are pretty much indestructible, live in the brush on the side of the road, and are filled with liquid8. In their natural habitat on store shelves and in the fridge, they are inert, orderly, and innocuous, but when they get out into the wild they become an invasive species, and pretty soon they’re everywhere.

They’re going to eat us

Invisible Section

A Game Of Telephone

Do people still know what “telephones” are? or is it all just cellphones these days

Its high time we see if I can retype the same section every week. The people have been waiting for too long.

History

What have the babies been up to this week? Aggressive, malicious, insatiable clothing

Our toddler loves clothes, and loves putting on different outfits and combinations, and this week she figured out how to get out of them, which means she’ll just run in naked with a new set of clothes from her drawer constantly and beg us to put her in the new outfit. Which means she’s piling up laundry at a rate normal households would need dozens of kids to match. Its like the financial swapover to feeding a teenager, except she’s 2.

Our son picked up a swear word so I talked with him about it. I told him he’d hear swearing in videos and stuff, but that those are bad people and we want to raise him to be a great person, and to try to cut down on it I told him he can say gosh heck or dang. And then an hour later he started constantly saying things like “They’re bad? How dang bad are they?” There’s a lesson here about giving kids abusing every goshing tool you give them.

Our son was dissatisfied with the amount of grape soda we gave him. He told us: “I’m still thirsty and… My tummy wants grape sugar.”

Son asked us: “Have you ever seen a movie with my dream?” I still have no idea what he meant by that.

Our toddler has learned her fourth or fifth word. “Seaweed.”

Horoscopes

The stars just left us a dialtone so we’re just making these ones up

Brooding detective: Some reader is going to barge in to badger you tonight. Keep brooding.

Boisterous reader: You’re the best side character a man could ask for. Go find a detective to glom onto.

Ducksnax

Seaweed

We’re so sorry about shipping a duckstack without a title last week. You probably didn’t know what it was, and assumed you were being attacked by numbers. If there were any casualties, please submit a claim1 through duckstack health insurance, here:

Welcome to the river styx. As you can see, the ferryman is a stack of several ducks in a trenchcloak. He will get you across the river safely, as long as you follow the safety procedures. Here’s today’s newsletter, be sure to go over it a couple of times before dying.

The Law Of The Jungle

How to play Kick The Can

If you add up all the percentages on the chart below, you will find that you can prevent 553% of violent crime by simply never letting criminals out of jail, ever.

There is a mishapen idea of mercy in the world, and it goes something like this. “The worse of a sin you pardon, the more merciful you are.” In pursuit of piety, criminals are released and re-released. You can look at these lenient judges as activists, deliberately terrorizing society, and in New York that is true. Its also true that white people have innate difficulty finding ethnic people guilty. But these are all the wrong lens, the right lens is that these leftists are simply full of radiant, beaming, hope.

It isn’t really that the Leftsists do not believe these guys are criminals. Leftists wanted to lynch Kyle Rittenhouse (and every paramedic supportive of him) long after there was full video footage of the incident from multiple angles showing the boy getting the snot beat out of him with skateboards and pistols before he started firing. The issue at issue was that justice was done, meaning the feral ‘people’ were not given a chance to repent. This offends leftists.

Some guys call Leftism “cultural Marxism” and this is an unhelpful and unclear label, but it is true. Marxism is defined by seizing the means of production from the wealthy and redistributing it to the poor, and when you frame this as not just economic Marxism but “cultural” it means taking from the virtuous to give opportunities to the diseased. The good cultures exist to be parasitized and seized by the cultures of poverty and destruction.

As a result, a massive amount of the economy is increasingly sliced off from productivity and diverted to escaping the consequences of the civil rights movement. You can’t discriminate in lending, you can’t let people form their own risk pools in insurance, you can’t have real estate agents telling buyers whether an area is high crime. You can’t have standards at public pools so everyone needs to have their own private pool. And so on. You will notice an increasing amount of bars over mundane items at your grocery store, because stores can no longer rely on the government to effectively deter shoplifting. If you can’t keep criminals incarcerated, then all public spaces have to be converted into prisons. Mercy to the wicked is cruelty to the innocent, and how much flesh are we comfortable carving from people to pad people from the consequences of their actions?

I’m not saying anything new here. Its corrupted Christianity, where mercy robs justice. Jesus said to forgive, and that means we don’t get to have any standards. This includes the standard of believing in Jesus at all, which is why most leftists become atheists- its minimalist. Pure. The religion with all the extraneous bits shaved off.

With the Book of Mormon (a book full of righteous violence) its a lot harder to go to that take away, but you can find leftists everywhere, because guilty people like to believe they don’t need to do anything to get forgiveness. You can preach the temple-table overturning Jesus all you want, but its not really going to stick, because that Jesus isn’t found in their bibles, and they do not see that Jesus as an authority. Also the moral of that story is not very clear. So there is need for a secular argument, but the wheat and tares have been growing together for a while now, and it is becoming easier and easier to pick them apart, based on the fruit.

History

Our son knows every car on the road which is the same as our car.

Son throwing a ball and it fell down and bonked his forehead: “how dare you drop and bonk on my head!” (picks up the ball, throws it again, it rebounds and bonks him on the head again)

Baby girl has started clicking her tongue, and running around with blankets like a little old lady shawl.

A game of telephone

Ring ring

Its high time we see if I can type the same thing every week. The people have been waiting for too long.

Top Five Things To Drop Directly On Someone’s Head from Four Stories Above Them

You’ve seen it in cartoons, but now its real life, and I’m writing a section on it.

1. Bowler Hat. Or even a set of bowler hats. Imagine how good it would feel to waft down ten bowler hats and dapper-ify ten dudes innocently walking in a triangle below you.

2. Anvil. I’ve never even seen an anvil before. Imagine tossing something as heavy as a car but the size of a child gently off a four story ledge and it landing on your friend, squashing him flat as a pancake, and he has to spend two hours walking around as a two dimensional being. Classic.

3. One Feather. This one is actually really difficult, which is why it would be so satisfying. It would probably take a ton of tries to get right but in this dream, you get it right first try. Didn’t that feel good?

4. The Interdimensionally Enabled Kirby Vacuum Cleaner. Just think. You throw it down, and it sucks them up, and they meet halfway in a glorious moment before it shunts them to an alternate dimension with magic powers, and even a harem. You’d never know where they went, but as the vacuum clatters to the ground, you would smile in satisfaction, knowing you could wonder about it for the rest of your life.

5. Whitespace

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Ducksnax

Paint 2

Here we are, just park your duckstack right over here. The valet will take it. Yes, we’re going to park it right in this gentleman’s email. You’ll be free to come pick it back up again anytime.

Just kidding, we lost the keys, its stuck in their email forever, they’ll probably have to call a towing deletion service just to keep it from junking up the space. Sorry about that. Enjoy your night though!

Public Service Announcement: New Tree

Please don’t cut it down like the last one

If you’ve heard the wailing cries of the damned when you go outside in your yard recently, do not be alarmed. Our Duckstack environmentalists have simply determined that your yard could use some more greenery, and have installed a new willow tree. A weeping willow, to be precise. With the salty sap that drips from its pores constantly, and its elegant, sprawling branches drooping low to the ground in despair, this tree should provide a unique combination of hydration and shade to your yard’s ecosystem. Don’t worry, this service is provided free of charge. Just part of our commitment to the environment!

Meme religion

If its a viral media personality, its probably a virus.

This week, a meme convert to Catholicism and a meme convert to orthodoxy were exposed as insane alcoholic drug addicts who were cheating on their spouses with each other and of course they were big time NeverTrump republican pundits with a lot of high profile contracts with various media agencies who rose to prominence lecturing people about chastity and how to make a good marriage and in general being vocal commentary givers like most of us online, with the small detail of not believing any of it.

Sounds like a lot of trouble, right? One rose to prominence in under a year, and the other has a long history with Ben Shapiro’s Blaze TV, among other things. These people each had over 100,000 followers. That’s a lot of people who apparently were unable to register their sliminess, even though it was obvious to me from pretty much the moment I heard about them. Not that they were cheating with each other just that they were hacks, I mean.

In my right wing extremist circles, we have the term “low IQ racism”, to describe the failure mode which is becoming ever more popular, where stereotyping goes beyond just acknowledgement of cultures and averages and motivations, and into conspiratorial type thinking, where the described group is seen as basically an evil djinn manipulating the fate of society and which conventional methods like logic, empiricism, and argument are seen as too tangible to even interact with. Haunts and specters require ghosthunter Ways Of Knowing12 and ghosthunter Solutions. Just like in marriage, negotiation is harder (and requires a lot more humility) than just going to war.

Discernment is not really something that can be taught, since most of it comes down to practice with people, having “seen the type” before. This is difficult, nuanced, takes effort, and nobody has any appetite for learning the little heuristics like “If someone is doing a big public conversion they’re probably in it for the spectacle” or “prostitutes who claim to be penitent but are still setting themselves up for attention and to be fawned over are probably not” or “highly worldly women are probably vulnerable to worldly peer pressure towards dissolving their marriage” and so on. In fact, most people are not even inclined to verbalizing their intuitions about these things. So when their discernment blatantly fails them, people will get mind broken by it and invent a heuristic so wide its supposed to be a catch-all so that they never get burned again.

Coincidentally, this is often exactly what the meme converts are doing as well. I would estimate we are at most about halfway through “woke”. In hindsight, nearly all of it will have been essentially fads- But there’s still a lot more to come, and there’s going to be a ton of religions that are going to misread the winds and bend the knee. Most churches and especially most pastors rely on voluntary tithing to make money- meaning if their messages aren’t popular, they actively start dying. As society continues to deteriorate, people are going to flee anywhere they can that promises any sort of principled, institutional refuge, which is what we’ve already been seeing in the mass wave of young converts to Eastern Orthodoxy- a church that was hitherto nearly entirely racial and entirely unheard of in the United States. It isn’t really about the religion’s truth claims, and the difference between “in it for the prestige” and “in it for the alignment” can be razor thin.

Thanks to a preposterously large investment portfolio, The Church Of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints finds itself in the somewhat unique situation of being able to say “no” to converts, and thanks to being the least fashionable religion on the planet, basically every prospective convert needs to swallow their pride in the first place, meaning basically nobody is converting for clout reasons. I’ve seen it happen but then they realize they actually did just sign up to stay off of coffee and booze and they immediately self-weed, which is an incredibly handy doctrinal immune system, when you think about it. Not that we want people out, of course, but the church can actually stake sincerity above other factors, and it doesn’t even need to be that rigorous about it. Unfortunately, similar standards were not implemented in church owned auxiliary organizations such as BYU and Deseret book, and the church now finds itself playing catchup, but the apostles have been taking measures to gradually bring these institutions back into alignment.

A lot of religions don’t have this, and a lot of organizations don’t have this. If the federal government had this it would probably go a long ways towards lowering racial tensions in America- Most neocon pundits aspirationally claim America is a “nation of ideas”, that anyone who believes in American values can be an American. And the problem with this isn’t that such a nation couldn’t work, its that as it stands such a thing is unenforceable. We all know leftists don’t really believe in freedom of speech, religion, guns, capitalism, and so on, but are they no longer Americans? What would America have to look like, to be able to revoke citizenship on this basis? A lot would have to change to build such a nation. So this rhetoric is mostly self-serving, to go the normal idealist route of espousing an ideal to avoid having to get your hands dirty with subpar solutions and actions.

I’m not going to say hypocrisy is bad. Everyone is hypocrites, espousing standards they fail to meet, and its not wrong to do so. But when there’s a path of least resistance, the people traveling that path are likely to have a lot of different reasons for doing so, so its going to be a lot harder to judge that path on its merits. Standards can go too far, expecting the superhuman is a recipe for disaster, so this is something where a person really does need to walk in the middle and mind both sides of the road, forgiveness in one hand and prudence in the other. The name of this virtue is: Temperance.

A Game of Telephone

Please welcome this exciting new regular duckstack feature

I think its high time we started seeing if I can retype the same thing verbatim every week. The people have been waiting for too long.

History

A series of Spooky Sentences hits the bobdaduck household…

“mom did I fall out of love… or murder?” Could go either way I guess

“caterpillars go into cocoons and then murder turns them into butterflies.” Kids got some strange ideas about death.

Our son, in tears: “I don't love holes more than dinosaurs…” Turns out he was upset that his sister had stolen his crocheted blanket and given him her dinosaur blanket.

Our son, staring at himself intensely in the mirror: “I can't move my eyes around” Not without looking away from the mirror

I asked my son: “why were my shoes outside?” and he told me “I put them in the greenhouse so they could be warm.”

Loreoscopes

what’s your story?

• Fable: The stars in the sky are speaking to you, the constellations are animate. They are going to teach you a moral lesson, but its going to take like 8 billion light years for it to get here.

• Parable: The stars are your metaphor. A metaphor for nuclear fusion.

• Novel: There are a lot of stars in the sky, and a lot of different things happening. Most of them aren’t necessary, but it makes a pretty whole. Just like you.

• Epic: The number of stars is staggering, and our sun has to kill all of them.

• Short Story: Your star sign is the falling stars, which burn brightly before disappearing, unless they annihilate all life on earth. You are a dinosaur.

• Poem: Some of the star names rhyme, and you should only draw constellations made out of those ones. Just call it an animal or something, its not like anyone really checks these things anyway.

Ducksnax

katamari

ATTENTION. As of now, every constellation in the sky is called “Duckstack”. The Little dipper? That’s a Duckstack. The Big dipper? That’s a Duckstack too. Any other dipper? Same story. Orion’s belt is now a Duckstack. Now you might be thinking, “isn’t this a little bit confusing?” But you need to understand constraints are the beating heart of innovation. If you absolutely must, I recommend you simply attach a number to each constellation now Duckstack, in preference order. People’s numbers won’t match, but you’re both talking about a Duckstack, so harmony is still achieved. If you the reader are in a position of authority over astronomers, I recommend you start updating your star charts, because the change is already in an public. I’m pushing publish right now. Its going to everybody.

A Game Of Telephone

Learn all about corporate group communication dynamics from this exciting new Duckstack Feature!

I think its high time we started seeing if I can retype the same section verbatim every week. We’ve been putting this off for too long.

The Case for Apostasy of Christ’s Early Church

Cracking open a cold case of Apostasy of Christ’s Early Church with the boys

This section will be long, sourced, and boring, with multiple sub-sections. Feel free to just skip it if theological squabbles do not interest you.

I have been asked to provide the sort of “basic case” for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, in hard, secular terms.1 Latter-Day Saint apologists generally shy away from this topic, not because the case is unclear but more because 1) we don’t want to be mean to the Catholic church, who we respect greatly for its work in preserving the early writings and traditions of Christ and 2) it isn’t how our membership generally thinks about our own truth claims- we focus on the supernatural testimony of Joseph Smith, ourselves, and others, and this can sometimes give outsiders the impression that Joseph Smith was sort of a “runaway prophet” who took it upon himself to do what he did. This is an especially common misconception, because taking it upon yourself is how basically every Christian church operates anyway. Pastors of certain protestant sects will commonly go to college to learn what “the scholars” think about the Bible, then they’ll start or apply to be hired by various churches to lead and teach. So their teaching license comes from secular, academic institutions2.

The Catholic church and the Eastern Orthodox church, and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints are slightly different. We are what could be called “Sacerdotal churches”, meaning we believe authority to act in God’s name originates in a passed-down priesthood in a direct line from Jesus Christ. This is important, because it supposes that the priesthood roles mentioned by Paul in i.e. Ephesians 4 are official and hierarchical roles, not personality types. In institutional organizations, you cannot just take over because you feel like it, a judge cannot issue parking tickets, an employee cannot make hiring decisions. Under this view, Christ’s church is a literal kingdom, with literal offices and positions, which Catholics and Orthodox say continued institutionally, protestants say continued underneath the surface of the institutional church, and which Latter-Day Saints and some few others say stopped and was then restarted, and this is what I’ll be laying out the case for here.

When Latter-Day Saints talk about “The great apostasy”, we are referring to the loss of true doctrines and, primarily, to the loss of priesthood authority. I’ll dive into those lost doctrines in a minute. For now I’m going to focus on institutional progression, because most people do not realize that the case for an apostasy does not revolve around Catholic errors, which would surely be disputable, but instead rests upon much simpler matters of historical record. To do this I will need to clear up some additional terminology.

When Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox talk about "apostolic succession”, what they mean is “apostolic cessation”. Neither church has, nor claims to have, apostles, though their reasoning for why this is the case varies. The Greek word “apostle” means “ambassador” or “delegate”, in essence an “authorized representative”- thus our central contention is that with the death of the apostles, the authority to directly represent Christ in matters was not passed on.

The evidence for this is more straightforward than expected. The institutional churches of Catholicism and Orthodoxy trace their line of priesthood authority to Peter through a man named Linus, who was never ordained as an apostle. He may, at most, have been ordained as a Bishop or Evangelist (missionary), but that isn’t the same thing, and with the death of the apostles, the apostleship was clearly lost. Whether or not God “would let his church fail” and similar “problem of evil” arguments are not germane- these are incontrovertible facts.

In response, the Catholic church says, the doctrine of apostolic succession was "developed”, as people started to notice they weren’t getting any more scripture. In the 1973 document “Catholic Teaching On Apostolic Succession”, the Vatican declares its state as “subapostolic”:

There are three broad stages along this path: the time before Easter, the apostolic period, and the subapostolic period, and each period has its own specific value; it is significant that what the dogmatic constitution “On Divine Revelation”, Dei Verbum (18), calls “viri apostolici“ should be responsible for some of the New Testament writings.

This helps one to see clearly how the community of Jesus Christ solved the problem of remaining apostolic even though it had become subapostolic. This explains why the subapostolic part of the New Testament has a normative character for the Church at a later period, for it must build on the apostles, who themselves have Christ as their foundation. In the subapostolic writings, Scripture itself bears witness to Tradition and gives evidence of the Magisterium in that it recalls the teaching of the apostles (see Acts 2:42; 2 Pet 1:20). This Magisterium really begins to develop in the second century, at the time when the idea of apostolic succession is made fully explicit.

Scripture and Tradition taken together, pondered upon and authentically interpreted by the Magisterium, faithfully transmit to us the teaching of Christ our Lord and Savior

-Source: Catholic Teaching On Apostolic Succession, emphasis added

Now, I am not an expert in which Catholic texts count as “authoritative” and which are more “peripheral”, so this is mostly to give you an idea of the kind of attitude that surrounds the shift from a living church producing new scripture and doctrines and prophetic visions, into a “steward” church that sees itself more as a preservationist. (For which the Catholic churches should be lauded!). But the essential note here is that the apostles themselves, in the scriptures, give no hint that such a change is coming- instead, they hammer home in the letters that each church must “endure to the end”, that “a great falling away must happen before the second coming”, that “a dark night comes wherein no man can labor”. So the justifications for the change must come post-hoc. As Catholic Answers explains:

As the apostles died, the task of shepherding the Church fell by default upon the highest-ranking ministers appointed by them. This group is known today as the bishops, who are the successors of the apostles as the highest shepherds of the earthly Church.

-Source: Catholic Answers, Successors of the Apostles, emphasis added

The Church Fathers, on this subject, proclaim their authority as markedly lesser to the apostles. Ignatius, one of the earliest church fathers, insisted: “I do not, as Peter and Paul, issue commandments unto you. They were apostles; I am but a condemned man.”

Thus, the only real question is this: Did the apostles leave behind “everything”? If so, did the institutional successors successfully preserve it? Was the ordination of Mathias to refill the number of apostles following Judas Iscariot’s death intended to set a precedent? Is “subapostolic” authority sufficient to put together the canon of scripture, in ~200 A.D.? Even if the apostles left behind everything mankind needs, would new, modern scripture from an ambassador holding full apostolic authority from Christ be /useful/? If so, what is the justification for a loving God withholding additional guidance? Surely the role of a prophet in the old testament rarely had anything to do with doctrine, and everything to do with warning, using God’s full authority, of calamities, disasters, and temptations unique to their society and day.

As for lost doctrines, I would suggest at least three, and this will comprise the rest of this piece.

— Lost Doctrine #1: Literal Resurrection —

In any serious religion, there’s a great variance between the official doctrinal creeds, and the folk beliefs of uneducated congregants, but looking at Christianity today, I see a huge missed message, which is Christ’s resurrection. Of course most sects believe Christ literally resurrected, but this is not used to conclude anything about either God nor mankind’s nature. Does Christ still have a body? If so, where in space is it? My impression is that, due to the developed doctrine of the trinity, the vast majority of Christians think that with the body’s purpose accomplished, his body has now vaporized and merged with the cosmic harmony. Most Christians are actively averse to thinking of God in bodily terms at all, hence the anger at Joseph Smith proclaiming that Christ’s Father has a body. “blasphemy”, they say. What does that tell you about how they view Christ?

Now, that’s not the official doctrine, usually. However, vitally, the scriptures also say that regular people are going to be resurrected too. This is not usually taken seriously, and I don’t just mean in a sort of “harps and clouds” picture of heaven. I mean that many people actively and directly believe that this resurrection is just a “spiritual” resurrection, a non-literal resurrection3. The doctrine has been “spiritualized” away from its plain meaning into near-irrelevance, when in reality it is supposed to be one of the most glorious doctrines of Christianity itself.

In lieu of this glory, Christianity is taken as a compliance religion- You follow it to get out of Hell, or get into heaven, but not because it excites you. Such a Christianity is almost by necessity tribalistic, having only abstract “good news” (the greek meaning of the word ‘gospel’) or no news at all. This Lost Doctrine also leads to a cascade of Lost Doctrines- Most people say when you die you go to heaven or hell. But what happens when you are resurrected? Do you leave heaven or hell? Then where do you go? And more importantly, why? I ask you, if a religion is not equipping its constituents with a thorough map of reality, then what is the religion’s point?

—Lost Doctrine #2: The Premortal Life —

Most people, instinctively, believe in an “antechamber of souls”, and once you start having kids, it becomes nearly irrefutable. Because this doctrine is known but not fleshed out, you have a lot of the tragedies of liberalism- people believing they could be born in the wrong body, or as a different ethnicity, or many other cosmic accidents. But if your spirit has a pre-existence, then that pre-existence must be causal. In other words, your current mortal circumstances are influenced by actions you took before your mortal birth- The Jews knew this, and they asked Christ if a man’s circumstance was because he had sinned before he was born, and Christ expounded on that doctrine by explaining that some premortal curses are to the recipient and God’s glory. God told the prophet Jeremiah he had ordained him a prophet before his body was even formed in the womb. What great things did God ordain you to in your life? What responsibilities might you bear, either by call or by volunteer?

The issue is, people don’t know where they came from, so they don’t know why they’re here. As conservatives (most people who read my blog are conservatives) we understand how important lineage is. When you understand the giants whose shoulders you stand upon, you feel the responsibility of the past, and it keeps you from making mistakes in the future. I grew up with this. Most people did not.

—Lost Doctrine #3: The Nature of Trinitarian Unity—

Here I copy a response I made to a gentleman4 on twitter this week, who claimed such things as philosophical metaphysics demanded belief in his idea of God, which is that Christ and his Father are a single existence with two “persons”- that the idea of God itself demanded his Eastern Orthodoxy theology. This is what I said:

“The trinity has one essence.” Who told you this? I can make up a concept called "hyper essences" which make up trinity essences and there's three of them so you have three hyper existences instead of one. Or better yet you could have a trinity of four beings, or more. There's no "philosophical argument" that guarantees against any of these constructs because there was no argument to arrive at them in the first place- the idea of essences was derived post-hoc, from motivated reasoning of early Christians who were embarrassed by the Jews accusations of polytheism, and were unwilling to take Christ literally when he said it was his Father. They didn't go "oh, the ontological argument and TAG must posit three persons and no more and one is the savior of mankind" or whatever, but this philosophy is instead invented backwards to make your specific flavor of Christianity sound reasonable, and this is especially evinced by the constant chorus that there are no earthly analogies for the trinitarian unity, despite genesis stating God created man in his own image. The reason your idea of God is unlike anything in reality is because it is fantasy, and a masochistic one at that. I can claim there's a higher dimension where 2x2=6, or =bagel, or =any number of other things, but this is both unverifiable, irrelevant to reality by definition, and transparent guesswork (or worse). Even if I was right, I would be right-by-accident, because it doesn't, and can’t, (by definition) map to reality in any meaningful way.

There is, however, a way multiple persons can share one 'essence' in the real world, right now, today, which is unity of purpose, and this is the true nature of the unity of the trinity. It isn't a matter of shared hyperdimensional matter (or however you visualize essence), but rather the simple, straightforward unity of a congress. This is, in fact, exactly how Christ describes his relationship with his Father, in John 17- "I pray Father that my apostles will be one, in exactly the same way as you and I are one." He literally does the things which please his Father- but this offends trinitarians, who don't want their God to be "common." A similar attitude the pharisees took, of course, but there are dozens more such verses. "I go now to my Father, who is your Father, and he's my God, and he's your God."

Christ and his Father are certainly one, and the scriptures describe several other things as one, most notably marriage, where male and female twain become one. Letting scripture interpret itself, the relationship becomes clear, and more importantly, real, because it is straightforward to understand a perfect congress.

But this is all too boring for the trinitarian doctors, most notably because it undermines their fancy philosophical juggling and "first mover" and "uncaused cause" arguments, which is what they really believe in, rather than Christ5. Nobody, especially a pharisee, wants to feel like they're worshipping a man.

But perhaps just as vitally, these fancy philosophical underpinnings (which mostly exist to make amateur theologians, of which includes everyone at Nicaea, feel special) make disciples feel "grounded". Because if the trinity exists within reality (as a real thing, rather than an astral 8D hologram projected down into our world to prove a point about Judaism), then they feel like reality must be "out of control", like there is no pilot at the head. They were fine believing God is originless but they can't handle believing the universe is, for mostly the same reasons the ancient scientists were uncomfortable believing in heliocentrism.

But the discomfort of the theological doctors on this subject does not translate to truth, "wishing does not make it so", and this is simply the truth of the way it is. Jesus Christ has a physical, resurrected body, just like his Father, just like Joseph Smith said. “The Son doeth what he seeth the Father Do.6”

Creation in all times has always been a process of mastery, not fabrication, like a potter sculpting clay. This is the way God does it because this is the way the universe works, and every cell in your body first came from nutrients extracted from somewhere else. It takes a prophet to unveil this but when he does so it fits, because it is real, rather than cool hypothesis or sophistry.

I am not a sophist, but if I have a little wisdom it is this, which is that I know how faith works, and you can't have faith in an eldritch God of essences and existences any more than you can have faith in a dog or a wild animal. You can't trust an alien mind, you can only submit to it, which is what trinitarian faiths generally do. But God in the scriptures wanted more of his disciples- don't just keep his commandments but follow in his footsteps, and feed his sheep. It was a pattern. Can man gather figs of thorns? Would a father give a hungry child stone instead of bread? No. The theology doctors don't operate on behalf of God, they operate for themselves, and by this we can know that they don't come from God, don't serve him, and aren't sent by him, because they simply don't have the tokens. But you do not need to take my word for it, because you can replicate it, and what you will find is when you pray to God as a man rather than a trinity, the power of God enters your life as never before. Because you can only have life eternal by knowing the only true God and Jesus Christ who he has sent, and because you can't know a trinity which is defined as unknowable7.

This is a bare bones, broad strokes argument, and I could cite many, many more scriptures on the subject, but the more important point is that this really is the way it really is, and because God and Christ are real, this doesn't actually need to be a matter of abstract discussion and hypothesis. You can literally just go up the mountain like Moses and meet the Lord- Christ isn't dead, he is risen, and quite involved with this Earth, and there is no need for philosophical navel gazing to hypothesize his nature. In actual fact doing so is a clear sign that one has had little or even no contact with Christ at all- you don't need to prove to yourself the existence of someone you see regularly, you don't need to thirdhand derive to calculate and originate your essence to your mother, she's simply there as a real fact of your life. And this is how my Father in Heaven has been with me. And so you'll forgive me if I come on strong and unimpressed with these trains of reasoning, I've seen them before, and tried them, and they didn't work, but in trying Christ he certainly has. He has always provided for me, and he has always pulled through for me in my times of need, and I will be grateful to my Savior forever.

!! Congratulations !!

Congratulations are out of order

• Congratulations to Santa, for another day off

• Congratulations to all members of the United States Postal Service who have birthdays today.

• Congratulations to you, the reader, for scrolling this far. You have found an isopod.

• Congratulations to my mom, she’s worked really hard this week8.

• Congratulations to me, for writing The Duckstack

• Congratulations to Dark Santa of the South Pole, whose mustache is especially villainous today, and who has ruined more lives than I can count9.

• Congratulations to everyone who has ever successfully been potty trained. I appreciate you.

That’s all of them

History: The Tower of Toddler Babble

Our daughter is talking! Not words though really

Everyone at our son’s preschool was talking about siblings and he proudly told everyone that he has a brother named Jethro. And so then a teacher asked “do you have a sister too?” And he looked over at our daughter who was playing nearby and looked back at them and said dead seriously: “no.”

We’re at that age where our entire house is filled with lava. I don't know how our son even learned what lava is, but he has and its happened and now we can't go ANYWHERE without being burned.

Our son a few weeks ago developed what he calls “vulture noises” where he plugs his nose to make some unique donald-duck like sound. This week, our toddler started imitating him. She can’t make the sound so she just plugs her nose and yells

My wife told our son this week “Your room is too messy.” He instantly replied, angry: “No, my room is enough messy!’

One of the good ways to be woken up is to be slapped in the face with pizza. My wife learned this when our toddler decided she was going to feed her

Ducksnax

Joust

Did you remember to purchase your free duckstack extended warranty? Duckstacks go bad, you know. The letters wear out, the pictures get lossy. The sections develop typeos. In rare cases, they can even go senile. You wouldn’t want to go all out of your way to read this, only to find out later on that this article was in need of serious repairs. You might find yourself stuck with a duckstack in “junker” condition for a long time, because insurance doesn’t cover duckstacks1, while you save up to get a new duckstack. For some of you, this is the only duckstack you will ever read. And it could get stuck in your mental garage forever. To play it safe, you better sign up for updates, recall notices, get well soon emails, miscellaneous thoughts and nonsense, &tc

What’s Up

A classic Buddhist Koan

What is up, really? Away from the ground? If I’m laying down up might be perpendicular to the ground. Is it just the opposite of my feet? What if I do a hand stand? Then up is below my feet. If up was just away from the ground, in space, that would mean up is every direction away from Earth. I think this could get really tricky when the fabric of space warps around gravity wells like black holes and stuff, because then you might have one direction away from earth curve into another direction away from earth. It really wouldn’t be linear at all and I don’t know a lot about Einsteins relativity but couldn’t that curve all the way around back towards earth? Food for thought.

Everyone Should Be A Writer

All about Evil Spirits and where to find them and how to catch them in pokeballs

Everyone knows the problem with witches is that they put hexes on you2. Its pretty rare to hear of witches who do any other form of magic, its pretty much all hexes, curses, and voodoo. They don’t seem to get anything out of this, they just do it for the love of the game. What is ‘black magic’? What do these magic forms have in common? I will tell you. It is ad hominem. The definition of all witchcraft magic is “fate altering”, the ability to influence people without touching them. This is concretely different from wizards shooting fireballs, which have to touch you, or the intervention of dieties, where Zeus lightningbolt still has to touch you. It becomes witchcraft when it pulls your fate invisibly, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Genre subversions aside, witches are generally considered “bad”, and that’s the psychology behind it.

People who feel out of control in their lives will grasp for “guardrails” so that, even though they can’t control their situation, at least they feel like they can understand it. And evil spirits/demonic possession/djinn provide that.

In essence, this is conspiratorial thinking. That there is a coordinated malevolence behind things, influencing things behind the scenes, so you don’t have to grapple with the arguments or complexity of what’s going on. Simplification is a necessary evil in most domains, but you should be aware when you’re doing it. If your statement could be swapped out with “evil gremlins” without changing anything functional, then even if evil gremlins were real then it would be more of a case of being “right by accident”. God does not propagate scapegoats, he encourages accountability. A couple simple heuristics for you, there.

There is a saying in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints that caring too much about evil spirits invites them, a gentle way of discouraging this sort of magical thinking. The idea that there is a voodoo shaman (but like, a ghost voodoo shaman) influencing you is a great way to learn helplessness, but God has given us the spirit of faith, not fear.

So what do we do with the New Testament? Were they casting out devils? Sure. I’ve done it too. Maybe there’s not even evil spirits involved and God is just honoring the person’s perspective and working within the framework they understand. But “possession” is the wrong term for what is going on. Its not mind control, its not body control, its not voodoo fate manipulation. What evil spirits actually do is talk to you. And like any mental tic, people can develop a habit of listening. So what “casting out” a spirit does is just give a person some peace and quiet, whereby if they have faith they can build better habits, get their life in perspective, and refocus. It isn’t strictly necessary, because evil spirits will get bored and leave, and you can literally just not listen to them, just the same as you have to intentionally listen to hear the holy ghost. “There are two wolves inside me.” “Which wolf wins?” “The one I feed.”

Jesus explicitly says exorcism is not some mystical solution. He says you can cast a spirit out but if its invited back in it’ll just come back. Instead of exorcism in at least one instance he encouraged his disciples to fast instead. You will sometimes hear stories of very sensational “exorcisms” where its portrayed as some sort of spiritual lightsaber battle with mana pools and tactics. In real life “exorcism3” is very peaceful, and is instantaneous, because you’re just giving the person some mental room. I theorize that the sensational exorcisms are an issue of authorization and faith4, not some sort of demonic RPG level system.

I know someone who is going through what is commonly called a “messy divorce” and someone said to me that they just can’t understand it, the wife is making her life much harder, and wasting tons of both of their money (like $60,000+ in lawyer fees), “it just doesn’t make any sense.” She just couldn’t understand it. I told her the purpose of a woman is what it does. The harm is the point, including the self harm.

Its pretty common in modern marriage to end up with a situation where the wife “werewolfs” transforming into a vessel of rabies and wrath dedicated to absolutely nothing other than hurting her soon-exhusband in the most therapyspeak way possible. Sometimes people do marijuana. People get into all sorts of stuff throughout their lives, you too. People don’t get into these things thinking about stuff like “consequences” and “prices”. People (yourself included) operate on a very surface level a lot of the time, so thank God that your internal memes naturally have kept you away from many grievous mistakes.

But we see here the power of narrative. If you think you’re weak to evil spirits, vulnerable to manipulation, you can start to act in ways that you think a person influenced by manipulation would act, exactly the same way people who think they’re vulnerable to witchcraft start looking for evidence of witchy manipulation. The types of narratives you find romantic make a huge difference in your perspective and therefore the options available to you. Even suicide is contagious. Because you’re choosing your option set when you narrativize it in your head.

It takes a fair degree of lucidity, or “metacognition”, to be aware of what narratives you are writing in your head. If your wife does something, you can be appreciative, or you can be demanding, focusing on the lack. The more you focus on the lack the more you build a castle of resentment, the more you self justify, at the expense of your marriage and your pro-marriage option sets, restricting your options ever more. When women “werewolf”, a lot of times they’re acting out a script wherein they are the hero against an abusive husband, the oppressed victim, and the reason they seem irrational is because they simply aren’t interested in information or perspectives that don’t enable them to act out their story. Sometimes its evil boredom, sometimes its evil self justification, sometimes its a mix of those and many other things. But mark this: People choose. That is what agency is.

The Enlightenment does a huge injustice to social relations because its narrative is that everything is “evidence-based”. You “follow the evidence”, you “diagnose the mental illness”, you come up with a bunch of empirical woo to explain behavior, and you talk yourself right into perpetual victimhood because you have chosen the mode of being a cornered animal rather than an agent who can afford to give others the benefit of the doubt. You act out the narratives you wrote, whether you wrote them on purpose and with craft, or sloppily with carelessness.5If your eye be evil, your whole body be evil, if your eye be light, your whole body be full of light6.

The Nietzschean Dialetic

The philosophy of the Übermensch

In 1883, there was a battle of philsophers7, and they were all named Nietzsche. They were the chosen ones. There was Red Nietzsche, born with philosophical firepower and leadership. There was Green Nietzsche, born an airhead but with a free and fun-loving spirit, and a down to earth philosophy. There was Purple Nietzsche, born with corrosion and he could deconstruct arguments in 10 seconds flat. There was Blue Nietzsche, a woman, and he had a compassionate and nurturing philosophical heart. There was also White Nietzsche with icy analytics and a frosty temperament. There was Black Nietzsche, who followed the philosophy of the fist, and several others.

The Nietzsche had to fight each other, highlander style, to become philosopher ascendant, just like each of us has to do with our colored counterparts today. Could they do it? They had to. Nietzsche isn’t a person known for his slave morality8. Every Nietzsche had to fight for his superiority, going his own way against all of the others. Every Nietzsche considered himself God, and he had to kill him.

As each Nietzsche sat by the fireplace, puffing on their tobacco pipes in the comfort of their homes, each of which was also Nietzsche colored, they rotated philosophies in their heads at astonishing speeds, an nth dimensional chess match composed of components of sheer thought. It was a bloodbath. Mauve Nietzsche died first, valiant in battle but ultimately unable to hold his form, disintegrating violently on the spot in a puff of Mauve dust. The other Nietzsches were too busy with the war to mourn.

Green Nietzsche took a walk. He went outside. He touched grass. They couldn’t attack him while he was on break. Then he went right back to it. Green Nietzsche wasn’t a slacker.

The battle really took a turn when several of the colored Nietzsches, under Red Nietzsche’s leadership, voltronned9 into a giant mecha Nietzsche, comprised of Nietzsches Red, Yellow, Blue, White, Black, and Orange. They decimated the battlefield while Green Nietzsche was out. Green Nietzsche swore vengeance upon them for his fallen colored brethren, but first, he had to survive, but then he forgot all about it. Ignorance was strength.

Brown and Orange Nietzsche collaborated to sabotage Super Mecha Nietzsche, Orange Nietzsche sacrificing himself to the greater good of all the colored Nietzsches, who he would have had to kill otherwise. Then nobody had to kill him, so it was really gentlemanly all around. But Brown had tricked him, and used the opportunity to backstab Yellow, Blue, and White Nietzsche’ in Super Mecha Nietzsche’s dissolution. This is where the other philosophers attacked, like Locke and Aristotle and Hume and stuff. It was Red Aristotle, Brown Locke, and Dandelion Hume because the other ones were busy. Brown Nietzsche didn’t survive the attack, but because it wasn’t a Nietzsche that killed him nobody got his power, which is why there’s no brown in rainbow Nietzsche today.

When Brown Nietzsche died he had White, Blue, and Yellow Nietzsche’s power, and they didn’t get lost but instead reconstituted into their individual Nietzsches, immediately rejoining the battle to vie for Nietzschean supremacy, except Yellow Nietzsche, who got nerd sniped literally the moment he reconstituted by Eggshell Taupe Nietzsche, who had been waiting in the sidelines for just such an opportunity. Dandelion Hume saw this and took him out, causing Taupe Nietzsche’s powers to be lost to time. Yellow Nietzsche immediately reconstituted on the spot, and then got immediately blown apart by a boulder launched by an ingenious catapult contraption that Pink Nietzsche had built in a temporary partnership with Tan Nietzsche, and they split the kill. This is known as “double jeopardy” and made them 4x as powerful rather than 2x, as long as their alliance lasted. They started to dominate the field, just like Super Mecha Nietzsche had, but just using their twinned powers. Eventually they fought Black Nietzsche to a stalemate, only for their stalemate to be interrupted by Lime Plato, nuking them all. Yellow reconstituted and immediately started cowering, but nothing happened. Then, just as he started rejoicing, Maroon Nietzsche slammed into him from above, dissolving him instantly, and Maroon Nietzsche too, both kills going to Red Nietzsche, who had turned evil. All the philosophers, non-nietzsche and Nietzsche alike, joined together to stop him, but his evil powers proved fatal. Finally, it was just him and Green Nietzsche, who had just gotten back from his break. Red Nietzsche had turned into a horrifying conglomerate of Nietzsches, Lockes, Humes, Platos, Aristotles, and even a couple others. He looked at Green Nietzsche through multiple melting faces, with multiple eyes. “You will never win. I have all the power!” Red-Aristotleplatohumelocke Nietzsche declared. “That may be,” said Green Nietzsche, “But I have something you’ll never have.” “And what is that?” Red-Aristotleplatohumelocke Nietzsche asked. “I forgot.” Said Green Nietzsche.

This infuriated Red-Aristotleplatohumelocke Nietzsche, and he took a mighty swing with a bloated and festering arm, the size of multiple buildings. “I’m going on another walk” said Green Nietzsche, and he did. When he got back, he found that the Red-Aristotleplatohumelocke Nietzsche’s blow had shattered the earth, cleaving a mighty hole all the way to the earth’s core. He was hanging on to a ledge, but his fingers weren’t as articulate due to their monstrous properties.

Green Nietzsche peered over the edge. “Your arrogance has been your undoing.” he said. He wasn’t gloating, he just figured Red-Aristotleplatohumelocke Nietzschealypse deserved to know the cause of his demise. “No! I can’t be defeated like this!” Red-Aristotleplatohumelocke Nietzsche said. “You all ready are.” Green Nietzsche said, a single tear falling from his eye, and with a wave of his arm he used earth powers to slam the fissure closed. An eruption of lava and power shot out, bathing the whole world in rainbow colors, but not like, in a gay way. Green Nietzsche fell to his knees. It was over. Then, he felt something, and it caused him to look up, and all of the Nietzsches were there. Red Nietzsche with his arrogant smile, no longer a monster. Yellow Nietzsche, with his can-do attitude. Orange Nietzsche with his sardonic grin, and all the rest, including Blue Nietzsche, a girl. They seemed to be congratulating him. “You did good.” they seemed to say. “But, will I ever see you again?” Green Nietzsche asked. “You all ready are.” they said. “We’ll always be with you, in your heart.” That was the day Green Nietzsche learned the meaning of friendship and became the Übermensch, which is how he knew so much about it. So next time you read Nietzsche, remember all the work that went into it, to make him the man he is today, and take some courage from it, enabling you to fight your own battles, both in the present and in the future.

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History

What’s the duck family up to. At this hour possibly sleeping

Being a parent, sometimes you will say things you never thought you would say. But also you will hear things you never thought you would hear. Our son, baffled: “You don’t like me pushing a marble into your belly button?”

Son gardening with mama, she didn’t want him playing in the dirt so she told him she was the dirt guy, and he was the water guy, and he told her “and the plants are the plant guys!”

Our son was doing preschool on the laptop and the toddler kept running to his side to look at the screen, and then around back to look at the back. Where does the screen go? I don’t even have an answer for her.

We’ve got some fancy chocolates with little circle shapes and half is raised and our son calls them “stairs chocolate”

Ducksnax

chilled

3

Every time I’ve “cast out an evil spirit” its been as a nudged afterthought in a priesthood blessing which the person asked for extraneous reasons- because they simply kept feeling depressed and gloomy, and God told me to cast out an evil spirit as part of the other advice and direction God had given this person in the blessing. And I’ve given thousands of priesthood blessings and its only happened twice. The third time wasn’t a blessing, I had just fasted for someone stubborn and angry. For more information about the mechanisms of priesthood blessings, read Fracture Pasture

Go to your freezer and your ice cream scooper, because its the newest limited edition flavor, duckstack. The frozen duckstacks inside have freshness guaranteed and because they were cryogenically frozen they will be just the same as when we first published it, unlike other newsletters which age with time, growing musty and stale. I mean, nothing against other newsletters, they just aren’t like us. They aren’t ice cream.

Digital Children

On surfing the net and Drowning

I, as a red blooded american male1, play a lot of video games, and so I am highly qualified to talk about the dangers of screen time, which I nevertheless think is overall a good thing, or maybe I am just content in my vices, but you can’t give them to children.

The first thing most parents notice when giving their kids “screen time” is the kid develops what I affectionately call “personality issues”. They start screaming, flailing violently, they lose their composure over minor things, and they’re meaner to their siblings for no apparent reason. If you’re in tune as a parent, you notice the change and it horrifies you and you naturally impose all sorts of strict limits on screen time. But then you realize that screen time is incredibly convenient. No parent in all of history was so blessed as to have their kids come with a built-in off button.

So what I would like to propose is a sort of tentative manifesto, or a set of guidelines to mark out an approach ramp for families grappling with the issue. By no means comprehensive, but by some means useful. It is first necessary to map out the territory, then to propose a set of hard rules that parents may rotate and negotiate, but must keep in mind.

First, the internet is dangerous. You can easily encounter “concepts2” far before you have the world context to parse or integrate them. And make no mistake this can be a good thing, if it forces you to mature faster (as in social communities where the child ends up hanging out with and therefore socialized by people much older and more mature than them)- or a really catastrophically bad thing if the kid ends up socialized by insane dysregulated schizophrenics, who on the internet are equal to well adjusted normal people3. Not only that, but the internet can force “specialization” into niches both in interest and in culture. The kid who loves trains can now spend 100% of his time looking at trains. He won’t even know what cars are. Your kids can watch TV shows (usually old shows) that show how to get along, or they can watch literally 24/7 fart on your mom destroy property and punch each other content. And if they are left alone with a remote control, they will find this content, likely in less than 10 minutes.

• Hard Rule #1. You cannot count on other parents to be lucid. I wasn’t raised to play violent video games but quickly learned where to find it, I knew which friends had “the hard stuff”, blood-and-guns wise. I saw porn for the first time at 8 years old at a friend’s house when we were trying to download something for some computer game. Porn is on youtube. Porn is on your game consoles. Porn is in your library. Porn is in advertisements for mobile games. I guess its in magazines at other people’s houses too but that’s not as common anymore. Even innocent activities like watching cartoons are bad in excess, and your kids are going to learn extremely quickly which houses have the TV on 24/7.

Whatever your rules about screen time, every other house in your neighborhood is thousands of times more liberal. This means you have basically a choice between hermit withdrawal from society and raise your kids without friends, or inoculation. If you can think of a third option, let me know.

Inoculation means “preparation”. It means your kids must understand, at a much earlier age than their peers, exactly what is out there, how to avoid it, what to do when they run across it, but more importantly they must know why. I tell my kids “there’s stuff out there that looks fun but is actually bad”, but without me there he will just see “bright colors, lizard brain likey”. Kids rely on their parents to be their conscience, and you need to be doing this much earlier. Kids should be given not just rules for screen content at other people’s houses, but principles, as well as canned, recitable lines for why.

However, raising kids without screen time may also run a risk- most modern careers, even in construction, require a great degree of interfacing with technology. And the “turn off your kid” switch is really nice. But when you do so you must select the content, and preferably enjoy it with them, so they can model screen time behaviors off of you.

• Hard Rule #2: Screen time must be restricted to long form, guided content. Kids left to their own devices will watch the most spazzo crap imaginable. They gravitate to it.

A huge part of the reason kids become wild and aggressive after screen time is that they have difficulty re-adjusting their attention spans. If kids are allowed to switch videos rapidly when bored, they will maladjust to the excitement, and act out simply to keep more excitement going. Movies beat TV, TV beats youtube shorts. You can show your kids shorts but they should be forced to return to reality after. If you play with them this helps. The goal here is to make screen time as similar to books as possible so that they can transition seamlessly while feeling minimal loss.

-Hard Rule #3: Games should be restricted to social, creative games, then single player / local multiplayer platformers, in that order. Games are an essential part of human socialization, and video games are increasingly a part of that. But not all games are created equal.

Kids actually have a lot more drive than adults. If given motive, they can learn all sorts of skills at an accelerated pace, meaning if you can find a game that has modding (for coding skills), video sharing (for editing skills), level building (for spatial/geometry skills), and so on, that game should be encouraged over others. However, even simple platformers teach things like spatial awareness, hand eye coordination, problem solving, and dealing with failure, (or even just reading lol), all of which are valuable and highly transferable adulthood skills. Purely competitive games, however, should be avoided- anything with a “meta” will restrict creativity, corral social interaction, and often expose your kid to verbal abuse- and not even the productive kind.

Furthermore, the meta and repetitive nature of competitive games leads to a much lower return even on enjoyment. For every hundred happy memories a child will make playing a creative/social game, a child will make one happy memory in a competitive game. Winning means very little, long term, and as such competitive games should be more restricted until the child is old enough to appreciate serious tactics and spreadsheets.

• Hard Rule #4: Children should not be allowed to rely on video games for entertainment. The reason for this is that imagination and creativity are a childs biggest assets. Their lower exposure to the world allows them to act in contextless ways that take surprising and delightful angles, and are also some of the most joyous parts of being a child. If video games become a staple, rather than an occasional indulgence, you risk crippling the child’s imagination due to restricted franchise.

Many children’s happiest memories come from playing out silly elements of video games or shows in the real world. Too much video games restricts this, such that children will simply default to screens in any environment, and without them won’t know what to do. Possibly screen time can be gradually increased with age, but you should think about it like “exposing” your kid to video games, not letting them swim in it, at least without floaties, until they are thoroughly taught to swim.

• Hard Rule #5: Parents must parent their children4. because screen time is an off switch, your kids are spending less time with you than kids at any point in your ancestors history. They were not genetically prepared for this. This effect doubles because parents, too, are on screens.

This means things like parental discipline will be more of a shock to kids, who have spent a fraction of their day’s time less acclimating to their parents environment. Parents should deliberately spend time talking to their kids and telling them about what they are doing and why, and actively block out personal time with them. Especially fathers, who kids look to for structure and boundaries.

• Hard Rule #6: No Touch Screens. Do not give your children Hell Rectangles. Do not plug them into the matrix. Do not rip their souls from their bodies through their eyeballs. Do not give them out of body experiences when their spirits are just merged with it in the first place. Children are not designed to be beings of pure thought.

I recently bought a new phone, a Unihertz Titan Slim. Its cheap chinese hardware with tons of issues, and I will never again buy a normal phone.

The Titan Slim has basically everything a normal android phone has including a touch screen, with two distinct differences: A physical keyboard, and a very small screen. I immediately noticed a difference- this phone felt healthier. The difference is literally the buttons, where it no longer feels like action is divorced from body, but the screen size helps too, where it feels less “swallowing”. This power is too dangerous, and children must be taught that the body correlates with action, even with use of machines. I do not, necessarily, recommend this particular phone, but I do recommend sticking to mouse and keyboards, joysticks, arcade machines, and anything governed by actual machine.

I don’t believe parents need to “parent all the time”, in fact I think that’s probably counterproductive, but more intentional use of technology will go a long way in the environment kids are going to grow up in. With some intentionality, technology can even be a huge boon, with AI acting as a personal tutor for all sorts of subjects. The future is bright, you just need to keep your eye on the ball, lest your children get stuck in the sandpits that are now available to them.

• You cannot count on other parents to be lucid.

• Screen time must be restricted to long form, guided content.

• Games should be restricted to social, creative games, then single player / local multiplayer platformers, in that order.

• Children should not be allowed to rely on video games for entertainment.

• Parents must parent their children.

• No Touch Screens.

Duckstack Technology: Cell Phones

What are they? They aren’t made of cells, and they aren’t made of phones

We sent our best duckstack scientist, Alfonzo Jr. III, back in time with a cell phone to record the rise and fall of the Roman Empire for our high school science project. He hasn’t returned and we have no idea what to put on our trifold display board. Please we really need this grade.

Help

History

We went car shopping this week, and our boy decided he “wants a car.”

One of the dealerships had a bright purple jeep on their show room floor. Our son loved the color. “I love love love this car and its tire tail”

Unprompted: “I don't like bad guys anymore”

Unprompted: “oh my gosh. I wasn't born yet when mama was a baby.”

We got him a sort of chocolate egg, and after he had eaten it he told us he had eaten his “chocolate chrysalis”

My wife commented that our house was about to be 100 years old, and our son wondered, “why does this house have birthdays? I want a young house.” but then he thought about it for a moment and ran into a problem: “but, where is the house store?”

Our son, hopping from pillow to pillow: “The floor is lava!” his little sister, utterly failing to hop from pillow to pillow yet nevertheless following him faithfully: “Lala!”

Alfonzo Jr. III Update

thank goodness he’s alive. Well he’s dead now but he was alive in the past. No problem

We have discovered near our lab a carrier snail, similar to a carrier pigeon, injected with one of Alfonzo Jr. III’s four emergency immortality potions. The snail was well trained, and also very slow, and so only made it a few yards from Alfonzo Jr. III’s original past location, with an important message explaining his absence, which is that apparently the ancient Roman Empire didn’t have cell towers, and Alfonzo Jr. III has been wandering around without service for all this time until he died of old age, happily married to a nice lady duck named Aurora. Alfonzo Jr. III describes her as “old fashioned, but practical” and requests that she be cloned in our lab once we bring him back. Good for him.

So that’s good data, but Alfonzo Jr. III notes that the ancient Romans didn’t have charger cords, and so once his phone ran out of batteries he’s been unable to continue his mission, and he used all of his spare batters making sparks and lightsabers and other such things in order to secure a place in the Empire’s palace structure as a court magician. He says the job pays well, but none of the Roman grocery stores sell charger cables, nor do they even know what an “electrical outlet” is.

To fix this, he invented a new religious character in their mythology he named “Zeus”, who was known for charging cell phones and things like this. Hopefully that doesn’t alter history too much, Alfonzo Jr. III writes.

So we sent Alfonzo Jr. III a care package consisting of 30 or 40 more cell phones, and instructions to copyright his new religious myth immediately, we’re going to be so rich. Once we graduate High School.

Ducksnax

lightbulb

Welcome to The Duckstack petting zoo. What’s that? Another duck to pet. Walk down the road and what do you find? Another. And Another! What a sight. You’ve pet the ducks, now take a short stroll down to the stream, where you will find several ducks lounging, suntanning, and taking a “dip1” in the water. What a marvelous find! Continue on and you will find a duck by the road. He is so friendly! Walk a little further and you will find the pride and joy of our petting zoo: Four ducks, jousting. You made it to the duck stack.

Duckstack Military Strategy: Supply Chains

I expect all of you to be generals when you grow up

Every Napoleon2 will tell you, a supply chain is vital in war. You can’t war without it. A supply chain has two parts:

First, the chain. This is vital for all sorts of military weaponry, from nunchucks to tractor hitches. For seafaring campaign, you have to supply chain the anchor, otherwise it will just fall right off the boat and not do anything3. What do you do with prisoners of war? You put them in supply chains to make sure they don’t run away4. Supply chains are the swiss army knives of war.

Secondly, the supplies. A Japanese man was once hired for a warehouse stock managing position. After some time had passed, the owner came by for inspections. Naturally, he asked about the new employee, and the receptionist told him “he’s great, he comes in every day, very friendly, goes back to the warehouse. Only problem is, we’re running low on items.” The owner continues his walk through, reaches the sales floor, asks about the new employee. “He’s great, comes in every day right on time, very friendly, goes back into the warehouse and we never see him again. Only problem is, we’re running out of stock to sell.” “You never get anything?” “We never get anything.” The owner continues his walkthrough and eventually reaches the warehouse. He opens the door, walks in, and the Japanese man jumps out from behind a bunch of boxes. “Supplies!”

Why Is The Rum Gone

Every movie and painting is about woke nonsense now

I wrote three years ago about the deficiencies in Christian art when compared against so-called “pagan” movies and fantasy. If you don’t remember, please re-read the entire Duckstack corpus up to January 18 2023 to make sure you’re up to date5.

Some new information has come out since then, namely that leftists have been being given billions of dollars for free to make art or patronize each other and even small time leftist studios take welfare grants from the government for the sole purpose of making propaganda and leftist board seats are given to people with basically no qualifications because they’re democrats. So that sucks.

I would say, offhand, that I think leftists are slightly better at making art than rightists. They’re less practical and more boundary pushing and so more fearless at exploring concepts, albeit way, way more preachy about it. The most heavyhanded Christian movie about owning an atheist professor in a college debate couldn’t dream of being as heavyhanded as that one brooklyn 99 episode about coming out to your republican parents about being bisexual. The reason I initially got into anime was specifically to avoid left wing art.

But it turns out, a huge reason we are swamped with left wing art, is because left wing artists are funded en mass and therefore have more time to practice. Practice is a very important thing. You can overcome all sorts of personality deficiencies with practice. You can have the worst idea in the world and get away with it if you’re a skilled artist. Rightists, with their jobs and families, don’t have nearly as much time to devote to honing their skills, and also they have to worry about getting cancelled, which is something we saw in the ~2020s, where basically anyone conservative in the film industry was unceremoniously fired. In other words, basically the only play to create marginally right wing art is to be self taught, self published, self advertised, self networked, self started, self funded, and then your art has to be visionary enough to go viral, or shamelessly pander (diluting the honesty of the art.) Those are table stakes. And its not like there isn’t “money” in the republican party- but if you talk to any RW artist who has made investor pitches, the only thing ideologically aligned investors care about is making money. “What’s your monetization plan? What’s your profit margin? How well will this sell?”

The left doesn’t care about any of this. They will literally pay billions of dollars to produce live action disney remakes that four people will watch just to give their artists experience and resume items. They will set money on fire for even a chance at getting closer to power. They will set themselves on fire. The right cares about power the way a wine snob cares about power. The left cares about power the way an alcoholic cares about power.

And occasionally, powerful and rich rightists will recognize this imbalance, and they will say: “Stop whining, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, get a job at panda express and work your way up to manager.” This is what Chris Rufo said after it came out that he’d given a ~$150,000 journalism contract to a militant leftist ex-pornstar. He actually taunted people online, telling them they needed to get good and that none of them displayed merit and their capabilities sucked.

The work-life balance of right wingers implies a dual dearth. Not only are the artists low on free time, but the creators and buyers are usually small, one-off projects, because the creators themselves are just doing things in their free time as they have energy and drive. My friend, Thomas O Bethlehem, recently produced a children’s storybook, and he said it was a nightmare finding artists, and for various reasons the short project stretched years before completion. That’s either a lot to finance or very little to live off of.

Now, the reason leftist artists isn’t really that they have really generous patrons. Leftists are generally speaking incredibly stingy and given to infighting. The reason leftist artists get funded is that they have captured beurocratic networks, and thus hold purse strings that don’t really belong to them. Businesses, including the federal government, tend to have incredibly deep pockets. So one possible solution would be to normalize, through either tax incentives, social pressure, or some other system, a way for companies to pay for their employees chosen patronage recipients. Companies should be paying for a premium $5 subscription to your favorite twitch streamer, and the reason companies should be doing this is because there is a tax write-off. Or favorite substack writer. Or favorite artist broadly. Leftists would support this too, because there are a lot of leftist artists. If companies get a small tax write off for doing this, they will do it, and companies will happily add it to their benefits packages on job listings. Corporate art credits or tokens would go a huge way towards turning our culture back towards beauty and away from ugliness. The only roadblocks would be modest measures to prevent abuse such as giving your art tokens to themselves.

In every domain of life, producers and consumers have difficulty finding each other. For something as thoroughly cancelled from the mainstream as right wing art is, this goes triple, and the first thing everyone who is ready to hire someone for something does is go “uh. Anyone know any artists?” This needs to be mitigated, and can be done via contests.

There are, of course, already freelance websites for everything imaginable, but people don’t know about them, just like people don’t know any good artists. There is a huge market for a service that facilitates connections, especially on an ideological basis, which is why I propose a social media integrated system, where you post a bounty, people bid, and you are able to clearly see their social media history and even a portfolio of previous works. That’s the easy part. The hard part is gatekeeping. Freelance websites are flooded with artists and barren of work, and so the average job goes for pennies, and so the only people who take the jobs live in third world countries. Tariffs solve this, meaning you have to restrict the pool of potential artists/buyers (art can be a broad term for anything from video to music to writing to coding).

So what you need is artists to be grouped by tags and community affiliation. This provides the shortest possible in-network filter that I can think of. If I have the choice obviously I will want to give money to my friends, but how do I know who is my friend? Most people will happily tell you6!

The people who rise to power are often not the creatives, or the people who are strong or visionary, but the people who are “connectors”, the people who are skilled at linking like minded people to each other. This was nearly the entire appeal of old twitter, and it remains a high demand service today that it is unlikely AI can ever replace.

A problem with government is that the government positions that hold pursestrings rarely pay well enough to be staffed by anyone other than third world communists, so government contracts easily flow to communist causes. In Utah in ~2018, we had an ocean wave of “LGBT rallies” and transexual strip shows and protests, and these events were all approved by public parks and city officials, and one of DezNat’s pet projects was attaching names and faces to who was giving these things a pass, and what we found was every coordinator and permission granter had a hispanic last name. Not that all hispanics are communists, but for whatever reason they seem to have little incentive to be conservative. Increasing funding for these positions is not very viable, but it might be possible to build something that increases the transparency of these positions in a simple way to interested parties. Ideally I think conservatives would just get someone in control of these levers and start using them in the same blatantly partisan ways that leftists have been, but it seems more viable to me that conservatives instead be warned in advance of impending government contracts so that vying for them is more simple.

If you can’t be a creator and you can’t be a financer, you can be a connector, increasing transparency and learning and simplifying opaque processes to help people who need it get where they’re going. You can observe that people hate tech recruiters and similar people who fill this role, but its because they miss the crucial part- tech recruiters aren’t your friend. They don’t care about you, they aren’t personal, they aren’t actually doing their job, which is why the vast majority of people land careers through referrals instead. Everybody wants help getting to new and better vistas.

hsitry

“this game is called the bus kills everybody.” "what are we teaching this kid, he’s got a murder bus!” The kid thought that was funny: “haha, murder bus!” and we tried to correct him “how about something nice, like kindness?” and I cut in with: “yeah, kill them with kindness.” And our son replied “No… Kill them… with murder. 😈”

Our baby toddler has learned to talk! Her corpus is7 “mama” (only when asked to say papa), “papa” (only when asked to say mama) and “duck” (every single animal no matter what including the chickens in our yard). She’s basically the perfect daughter

Asked the boy to put on a shirt, and he said “but, but”, (drops on floor, rolls under bed) “I'm under your bed?” Why didn’t I think of that

The kids have a set of fighting robots that punch each other and their heads launch off. They will happily smash and violently explode them into each other. And then we will find them both swaddling the things in literal blankets and putting them to bed. Killer robot dollies.

Ducksnax

Bubble

What does it mean, to duckstack? people1 have been asking this question since the stone ages, and we still have no clue what is going on. But we’ve got some ideas.

1. Its illegal

Every country of every civilization on the planet has banned duckstack. ‘cept America. Its visionary, its an experiment, its daring, its faustian. But they are definitely going to bomb us ove r it.

2. at least 10

We’ve tried with less, and it didn’t even break into particles. the more you got, the better the result, but we haven’t reached the cap, and theyre are definitely going to bomb us over it.

3. Flight?

duckstack can fly, but only when moving very. fast. thats what the machinery is for. the ducks don’t like it and they’ re definitely going to bomb us over it. that s why we keep ‘;em in the machine

4. tribbles

duckstack reproduce. very fast. Mitosis? its an emergency. but if fauci can get away with it so can we. bring me more boxes. this is important.

5. loud

there is. too much quacking. very loud. probably not jet engine loud but we cn put get engines on them to fix that,. the ducks will love it.

thos are the facts. theres probably more but. what can you do. forbidden knowledge comes with a price. eat our duckstack dust2. we’ll duckstack the moon if we have to. maybe the sun id. k. someone’s got to.

Top 5 Road Trips

Come on a journey with me

1. Speedbumps

2. Large rock

3. Pothole

4. Tripwire

5. Your friend’s foot

All of this is assuming you are walking, of course. If you are driving it is very hard to trip. Even if someone karate chops you in the shin. I don’t think I’ve ever even seen it happen. I hear people talk about road trips all the time though. It seems to be pretty popular so I hope I’m not just out of the loop or being deliberately excluded. Is this some Truman-show tier inside joke? Let me on it. Guys? Guys?

The Fatherhood Failure

The Step Dads Who Didn’t Step Up

There was a 90s trope about dads who would sit on the porch with a shotgun if a boy had the audacity to take his daughter on a date, the implied threat of doing unspeakable violence to the guy if he did something the dad didn’t approve of. This sort of nonspecific personal hostility what everyone wants in a father in law, so I imagine it got a lot of girls married.

You still see a certain type of old guy acting out this bit nowadays, but in 2026 it rings even more hollow. Nobody is worried about rape, the men don’t have the testosterone for it anyway, and in any case the boys are a lot more worried about getting raped. I even read an account this week of an ostensible Right Winger doing this for bit for his 20 year old secretary coworker, who he felt “protective” of3. He had secretly adopted her in his mind. More on this later.

The average marriage costs like $30,000 today. Massive, overblown productions for an institution which is, fundamentally, hollow, unenforceable, fraught with risk, and not even a particularly large step in anyone’s lives since they’re all having sex and living together for years before marriage anyway. This isn’t how it worked only a couple centuries ago, where marriages were mostly small time affairs. Now, people attempt to imbue it with meaning by force, throwing money and ceremony to try to recapture the magic which only standards and accountability could bestow before.

You can see a lot of the same spirit in this pompous protectionism. The father has an inkling that one of his jobs is supposed to be “protecting” his family, but what is there to protect his family from? The state has a near-total monopoly on violence. And I will say, my observation is that a lot of these fathers are not doing a whole lot of presiding either. Men who didn’t really lead or teach their families, now trying to recapture some of the magic by being overbearing, that which was supposed to be imbued by standards and accountability. We note most of the dads you see this talk from hardly care about sex outside of marriage as-such.

This same pomp protectionist generation was constantly encouraging their daughters to put off marriage, focus on a career, or even the abominable phrase “live a little4”. Did they not want grandkids? It is no wonder we are on course to a catastrophic fertility collapse- people were literally taught to do so. Just like how people were told to get college degrees right on the tail end of the credentials bubble, and now they are bewildered at “entitled kids” demanding student loan forgiveness and high paying jobs which are at this point nearly entirely given to foreigners5. But at least he pressured his daughter’s dates into thinking they’d have a psychotic father-in-law. Fatherhood accomplished.

Something you won’t see discussed much is how little dating advice men were given by their dads. You see a lot of insane redpill misogyny online trying to reverse engineer some framework for dealing with women, anything, because even an atrocious model is better than no model whatsoever. Nearly everyone I have talked to was basically just told “respect women” which is at most quite tangential to what men actually care about, which is getting women to like them. Nothing about managing hormones, nothing about resolving fights, just the quip “happy wife happy life”. There’s some missing steps there, isn’t there.

I know of some extreme cases where the dad basically adopted a new family later in life to cope for his parenting abdications with his biological one. The new family is all grown, the parenting already baked in, now all he has to do is lavish them with gifts and take credit. This is actually a common rich-man failure mode. Its a form of pornography and plays on men’s willingness to go along with fantasy in the exact same way.

A lot of the basic structure of what registers to us as “creepiness” is inbalance, not just in terms of age gaps or consent but often in simple relative perceived intimacy levels. I think a lot of sensitive young guys first got burned in love when they started treating a girl who didn’t really care about them as a confidant. But a lot of guys, especially old guys, didn’t go through that, because when they got married dating was still a functional institution, and getting married just kind of fell into their lap. Also without mass surveillance and social media importing dating norms from 1000000 different cultures at once, people were a lot less neurotic back then about normal things like kissing without asking. They know things have changed, but they don’t know what. Unless they had serious dating/family issues, a lot of fathers never had a need to understand raw relationship mechanics on an autist mechanistic level.

Most people rapidly learn to gauge relationship balance from body language, or how engaged people are in the conversation, basic stuff like asking questions. For people whose social skills are untested, they have no such mechanism. And once they get older, they stop caring, because the carrot is worth it: Power tripping

There’s something called (by me) Small Town Phenomena, where people are very snoopy and into each other’s business, usually because they don’t really have anything better to do6. It happens in nearly every insular community, whether a church group, a set of coworkers, or just an actual small town. Rather than gauging relationship, people will just act like they have a license to PI78 that they haven’t earned and which the socially anxious has no norm for discussing with them. Parenting mixed with gossip acted out as an overt fantasy. In an insular environment, “Small Town Problems” present opportunities for outsized amounts of street cred, which attracts opportunists like sharks to the water910.

Parenting is easy to do badly and so many will opt to act it out in safer, more exported ways, especially in a culture that conditions risk aversion. When you deal with risk constantly you start to understand how to fall and how to get hurt to minimize injury, risk becomes less scary, but the more insular your reality the more lost you feel outside it. This is what is going on with men who sit on the metaphysical porch with a shotgun, playing fantasies of being a tough guy, shouting at clouds, government, CNN. Its kind of a predatory instinct where they’re seeking easy marks, but not to rob, its more like they’re looking for props for their fantasy. This is what the sin of “objectification”, inasmuch as it truly is a sin, looks like.

And like most sin, in the end it is not others who are the most hurt, who mostly just see them as off-putting or weird, but themselves, who late in life find themselves wandering bewildered by the events that surround them, wondering why their understanding of human nature couldn’t predict their come social famine. A tragedy of manners and evasion.

Myers Briggs Horoscopes

Straight off the presses from Myers Briggs11 himself

• ISTJ: You are the first man on the moon, Niel Armstrong. You miss it every day. Your negativity is starting to pollute the atmosphere, and SpaceX will need to solve this one day.

• ISFJ: Discovery of fire is up to you. Get knocking rocks together. NOW

• INFJ: You make connections at lightning speed, which are always wrong. Do the exact opposite of everything you would normally do this week, to survive.

• INTJ: Though not particularly smart, you make up for it with brawn. Be sure to flex everywhere you walk.

• ISTP: Go to a bookstore and open the first book to the very first page. Dog ear it, and put it back. That is all.

• ISFP: You are destined to succeed in your entrepreneurial pursuits. Take out a loan for a million dollars NOW

• INFP: You are a ruthless terror to everyone around you. Try toning it down a notch. You regularly trample over people in your lust for power and your zeal for control.

• INTP: Spend some time in therapy. Talk about your feelings. Make them up, if you have to.

• ESTP: ESP isn’t real, stop kidding yourself

• ESFP: Try stepping out of your comfort zone this week. Try telling: Knock Knock jokes.

• ENFP: Join the draft and become a soldier. Become deadly in combat. You are uniquely suited for the “berserker” class, with its D12 hit dice and its Rage class feature. Make sure to come up with a cool jihad slogan.

• ENTP: Use your shyness to your advantage. Act weak and sad to draw out the empathy in others. Then swindle them

• ESTJ: Live in the moment. Develop short term memory loss. Burn all your plans for the future. Run around in contextless sensory hell because you have no clue what is going on. It will be good for you

• ESFJ: Do everything it takes to make your fears come to pass.

• ENFJ: Though your sensitivity knows no bounds, you show it through brutal honesty. Your brutality knows no bounds. Your friends are mostly there for the bloodsport.

• ENTJ: Your introspective poetry is inspiring to be around and a joy to hear. Where do you get it from? Your mother. The world would be a better place if you put personal poems up, everywhere.

HIstory

The toddler is obsessed with my keyboard. She knows where the money is12.

The toddler found bright red safety goggles and wore them around, especially to type on my keyboard.

In church, the kids class is called Primary. We asked him if he was ready to go to primary and he argued with us “you mean cranberry, not primary.” He had apparently been thinking it was cranberry this whole time

Toddler has a new hobby, lining hot wheels cars up super carefully, then stuffing them down her shirt

My wife put the toddler down to bed and then heard crunching. The toddler had a secret bed apple. Not the apple she was eating earlier. We took it from her and it woke her up. It was her comfort apple.

Games our kids play well together: Son grabbing toddlers legs and smacking them into his face, and then into her face. Games the kids do not play well together: Cars, read books, hide under blankets, sit on the bed, watch TV

The kids were taken outside today, first day in a while because its been cold and winter. They got the bag of chicken treats out and fed the chickens all by themselves! And then they fed the toddler. So… That’s another thing to childlock. Very productive though! The chickens were up to their eyeballs in chicken treats they couldn’t even eat them all they were so stuffed

Parenting involves sacrifice, mostly of bathroom privacy. This increases the difficulty rating of bathroom tasks13 significantly, especially when the toddler keeps ripping up all the toilet paper, but our son actually noticed and straight up brought in a brand new roll, all by himself. Incredibly thoughtful!

Ducksnax

slide

5

Substack tells me today’s letter is too large for email servers to handle. Click the title to read on Substack’s website.

Welcome to the worlds worst apex predator The Duckstack, which snares a paltry few hundred people a week. The majority of people in the world will never even hear of it because its just that bad at hunting. It lurks in the bushes, its beady eyes the only things you can see in the darkness. You shudder in fear. You walk by perfectly fine, nothing happens. The Duckstack doesn’t have legs. It literally just sits there hoping someone will walk into it. Imagine a pitcher plant, but worse. You look closer. It doesn’t even have fangs. Does it gum you to death? Yes. You have been gummed to death. The Duckstack claims another victim, and re-enters hibernation.

How To Make A Joke

No jokes 4 you until you finish this HR training1

I think there’s three components to most jokes. Subversion of expectations, shock, and cleverness. Those can be mixed and in different order and depending on the audience you’ll get different effect. A joke that relies on a high shock ratio might really depend on taste, circumstance, or even just subject knowledge, for example.

Any good joke subverts expectations, but people can have all kinds of expectations- they can have expectations about what concepts go together, but also about how people normally act, or what people do physically. For example, This Charlie Chaplin Video shows Charlie juggling bricks with his legs and feet, showing prowess that isn’t possible, combined with doing brick laying in a way that we wouldn’t expect. A subversive joke would be something like “A man walks into a bar. Ouch.” Jokes that are mostly subversive tend to be just weird and off putting.

Shock is a scale of extremes. An extreme joke would be something like, “A man walks into a bar. The bartender blows him up with a bazooka.”2 The action is extreme, the choice of the word “bazooka” is extreme. Picture me screaming this joke in walmart. Also extreme. And subversive. Some jokes are funny by sheer boisterousness, nothing to do with the content. Jokes that are mostly shock tend to be distasteful in polite company.

Cleverness is another competence metric. Cleverness revolves around making unexpected connections. It elevates the reader’s perspective in surprising ways, or is just outright fun enough to be funny. Often low tier jokes rely entirely on cleverness, like puns and stuff3. A clever joke might be something like, “A man walks into a bar and orders a double entendre—so the bartender gives it to him.”

Humor is a tool for all kinds of things. It increases your lifespan, it creates a social lubricant, it makes people feel a part of the group, and it can draw attention to things in different ways, for example a lot of people use self deprecating humor to shield themselves which I think is bad.

Somewhere along the line, people learned that criticizing themselves pre-emptively is a good way to prevent criticism, and so fearing criticism, they’re always trying to pre-empt it. A lot of times nobody was even going to criticize them in the first place.

But that’s actually the more benign version. There’s a subset of people who specifically make themselves small to gain power over others by hijacking the empathy circuits, whether consciously or not. And humor is as much a tool that can be used this way as anything else- one thing we see on twitter is an abundance of accounts that actually call themselves things like “worlds greatest idiot” and so on. Sometimes this is benign and they’re just trying to appear nonthreatening, but more often they are trying to gain license for their opinions to go unexamined, or even assuage their conscience. “I did already tell them what I am, so I don’t need to live any higher standards.” When people use self deprecating humor, I think people can read that this is what people are doing, so the humor falls out of tune. “oh, this isn’t a joke. Its actually serious.”

I think self deprecation’s real value is as a teaching method, when you’re being honest about your own vices. I’ve never learned to do this and truly envy some who cleverly isolate and scold themselves for being monkey brained or throwing toddler tantrums and such as a way of contextualizing themselves so that they can better repent and grow. The neurotic try to skew everyone’s perceptions of them constantly, but the wise turn that tool inward to enable themselves. Bottom Text

The Sign of The Cross

Christians Crossing4

Everybody who is anybody knows vampires don’t like crosses. In Peter Watt’s record-setting sci-fi novel “Blindsight”, he wrote that vampires are a different, brilliantly intelligent nonhuman species and their eldritch minds are full of strange geometries which enabled them to hunt humans, but there’s a vulnerability where they have difficulty with right angles, so the cross displaying four right angles makes their brains short circuit and steam come out of their ears.

This explanation was picked up by Netflix because they are evil, and in their Castlevania series they used this, despite their vampires being demonic entities rather than aliens and the right angle thing making no sense in a gothic catholic inquisitor fantasy setting whatsoever. Obviously vampires don’t like crosses because they’re creatures of unholiness and crosses symbolize Christ and mercy and good things. Which just goes to show Netflix is the enemy of Christianity, sanity, and all things faithful to source material.

However, The Duckstack is not a gothic fantasy setting, and our vampires are simply evil5, but the reason they hate crosses is because of their lack of aesthetic taste- they want all paintings to be crooked, and the cross represents correct ground-floor-ceiling alignment. They think they’re trend setting innovators but they flee when confronted with the absurdity of their inclinations. The hipsters flee when no man pursueth.

jistory

one kid two kid red black and blue kid

“so cute! we need more teeny tiny legs around here!” “I dont think thats going to work mama” (except he used her name) “what’s not going to work?” “more teeny tiny legs.”

Sometimes people drop things. When this happens, the toddler always goes “ohhh!”

Her brother is too energetic for back rubs but she will climb into your lap, point at her back, and then physically grab your hand and put it on her back. We can tell she’s going to be late at talking because why would she need to when she’s so capable of communicating

Ducksnax

hike

Substack tells me today’s letter is too large for email servers to handle. Click the title to read on Substack’s website.

Race: Human1

Class: Duckstacker

Level: 1

Hit Points: 6

Duckstack Ecology: Fish

Welcome to Duckstack aquarium, we got water and even the stuff in it

The Noble Clownfish: Look at his goofy shoes

The Spangled Starfish: Possibly the most patriotic fish of all time

The Angelic Anglerfish: what a perfect halo

The Merry Moray: An eel with a 0 second memory, every second a surprise

Jake From Accounting: A hole in his oxygen tank ensures he’ll be back to work soon2

Trade Goods: Hot As Ice

The masculine and feminine clash violently in a winter wonderland

The ICE raids in Minnesota are an extremely politicized topic and probably nobody wants to hear “opinion” on them, but I will be brief. I think it is probably wrong to act like protestors are innocent. You might believe they are just, that you think the federal government is wrong here (on this topic, the Church’s council when this all started was that members should seek to uphold the law), but my perspective is when a protestor gets hurt they kind of signed up for it. If you’re on a crusade against the government then you’re at war, you’re a combatant, and you really don’t have any claim on not getting injured at that point. As a parent I don’t have any tolerance for “I’m not touching you” provocation games- if someone is trying to agitate while maintaining plausible deniability that’s worse than aggression, not better.

My friend Bones has much more insightful commentary than myself. She’s writing a boddice ripper smut novel featuring an ICE agent. Nice.

Scripture Readings: Natural Law

I don’t know what natural law means, but I would classify unnatural law as things like, speed limits

¹¹ And he said unto them, What man shall there be among you, that shall have one sheep, and if it fall into a pit on the sabbath day, will he not lay hold on it, and lift it out?

¹² How much then is a man better than a sheep? Wherefore it is lawful to do well on the sabbath days.

-Mathew 12

This is extremely interesting reasoning. Its an appeal to hypocrisy, first off. Do things become ok just because someone else would do it? Obviously the Savior looked very poorly upon hypocrisy (self serving hypocrisy, anyway), but I believe there is more to this. This argument also happens to confirm all my unique biases about religion. Lucky me!

The context of the chapter is the pharisees finding Christ to be irreligious. Or “heretical” as we might say to day. Christ rebutted them with scripture, not to demonstrate that he was in compliance with scripture, but showing that scripture was not some absolute metaphysical yardstick- it had exceptions. That was when he referenced David and the shewbread, but he wasn’t citing a scripture here.

I have said for a long time that religion should be 1) useful and 2) describe basic reality. I get lynched for this daily3. Letting your important stuff die just to fulfill minor orthodoxy is indeed impractical, and indeed there’s a note about good intentions here, all of which culminate in the explanation that “The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath.” I wouldn’t say all of God’s laws are fungible based on whether they’re getting in the way at the moment or not4, but the amount that they are fungible in such a way is not zero and is probably more than we are comfortable with. Which makes sense if you believe God’s purpose is to make you a master, not a servant.

There’s some saying about measures becoming targets5, which was a huge part of the pharisees “whole thing”. The other part being self aggrandizement and power lust. Nobody’s perfect. But you can see with most of the times the Savior rebuffs them, it was this sort of thing- religion as a matter of compliance, rather than a tool, a schoolmaster, to bring you to God.

This doesn’t mean schoolmasters and law are bad. I’ve heard my fair share of pastors rail against “legalism” and they’re wrong. You actually do need that stuff to learn faith. The law of Moses wasn’t some mistake on God’s part. But there was no living religion behind it. At this point the pharisees hadn’t heard from a real prophet who God had authorized in something like 400 years, and there was nobody but John the Baptist to point them to Christ6. There was no living God to them, only dead scriptures, which they could interpret to their liking7. Whenever you get a dynamic like that, you’ll move quickly away from principle, and religion stops becoming a guide for better life, and becomes a tool to gain status, or worse, a security blanket, to assuage one’s own guilt.

Of course, guilt itself can be a security blanket. People love to performatively flagellate themselves- “if I punish myself, then God (/nature/karma) can’t justify punishing me once I have to confront him (her/it) later”. The jots of the law are used to avoid the whole8. You wallow in guilt to avoid having to rely on Christ’s grace. Probably a normal impulse, every child wants to be independent. “I can do it myself!” I doubt God objects to this! But the immediate question is whether you are truly repenting, which is measured by change of heart, not attempting to pay a debt. Is your conscience becoming more educated, more sensitive? Or are you covering it?

The point of shame or guilt or whatever is to get you to repent. To do soul searching. Most people don’t have time for that. But you gotta. If you don’t set time for it then you waste religion- the opportunity to become elevated.

DUCKSTACK COOKING: Classic Chocolate Chip Cookies

My lovely wife made cookies this week, and in preparation for this article, I didn’t ask her for the recipe. Instead, enjoy this recipe that I wholly fabricated using ChatGPT AI “in the style of the duckstack”. Let me know if it actually makes anything

History

Our history shipments have been slow lately because the history pipes are clogged

“are you killing my flowers?” she freezes. She puts the leaves back and shakes her head no, solemnly

Our toddler and her brother have very different personalities, which was again confirmed to us through ice cream this week9. The toddler cried when the ice cream melted onto her fingers, and the cone had to be gently wrapped in napkin to protect her. Her brother ate the cone first.

The kids love ramen. Toddler eats it with her fingers. Quite the spectacle. Not much to say about this but its a good memory so I’m writing it so I’ll remember it later.

Ducksnax

George

All aboard The Duckstack! May I see your ticket please? You do have a ticket, don’t you? Don’t tell me you misplaced your ticket. I can’t verify that. I need to actually see your ticket. Can they get here in the next few minutes? Okay then that won’t work. We’re literally ready to get started, right now. You’re really supposed to have your ticket ready. How were you supposed to know? Its new? I don’t believe you. I’m pretty sure we have always required tickets to board The Duckstack. I’m afraid I can’t let you on. No don’t cry, don’t do this to me, I’m just doing my job. Okay look I’ll call my supervisor. I’m really sorry but he said no, but I’ll tell you what I can do. You can sign right here, and instead of boarding, I can let you read. Reading is free. How is boarding different from reading? I don’t know. Just make sure to have your ticket next time.

Sermon: To Kill A Mockingbird

NEXT TIME: To deep fry a mockingbird

Have you ever heard of the prosperity gospel? God wants you to be rich, happy, with a hot wife or husband and never be sick and to skip through a field of flowers. You know religion is true when its coolest1, not whether it describes basic reality. What’s cooler than prosperity? You think this is naive and shortsighted and likely to cause problems for people that take prosperity doctrine seriously? That is not very prosperous of you, bro

One thing you can attribute the rise of therapists to is priests falling down on their job to provide useful counsel. People generally want to believe religion as such has all the answers. Skipping the part where specific doctrines map to any specific realities. In other words, priests are in fact becoming sheltered.

As technology and societal atomization increases, practical experience with what you could call “applied religion” has dropped abysmally. Applied faith sucks. The book of Job talks about this. Joseph Smith taught his apostles that they would have to be tried as Abraham and if they can’t stand it, they wouldn’t be fit for the kingdom of God. Jesus said this too. When the Lord walked the earth it was so urgent you couldn’t even leave to attend a funeral, you were supposed to deprioritize your own parents in the face of being able to walk with Jesus, who I remind you was a man, looked like a man, talked like a man. He didn’t have a constant halo and doves following him around to mark him as the son of God to ‘normies2. People only had their hearts and the doctrines they felt and the miracles they saw. But that isn’t the same as faith, and it definitely did not make it easy. “You have to sacrifice everything.” Modern Christians interpret this mostly in terms of loyalty, as if loyalty is a sacrifice. But most Christians don’t hurt from being Christian. In fact, it puffs up their egos. (I would say the lack of “hard doctrines” is attributable to Christianity lacking authority to speak for God, not cowardice). The point is that Christ directly tested his followers regularly, even refusing to feed them, saying if they didn’t put up with it there was no place in heaven for them.

So then his apostles were like, “then who on earth can even be saved then, that’s ridiculous” and Christ said its like a mustard seed that grows. Thankfully miracles also occur in proportion to faith, so there’s remediating benefits. Sometimes you can even soften people’s hearts. But that’s not common, what we see instead is people having zero faith and thinking that having zero faith is what’s going to soften people’s hearts. This is what “just be nice” usually means, in practice, especially (nearly universally) when it is being told to someone else, rather than to yourself, in the mirror. Sic Semper Jannie Centrists.

If discipleship made everything easy, people would do discipleship the same way they do drugs. We tend to be taught to think of niceness virtues as “conquering”, hence the rise of slogans like “love wins” and “just be kind” and everything else that assumes the proper way to run the world is the mere set of rules used to run a kindergarten class. But this is obviously insufficient. I keep watching good guys get divorced, and no amount of being Christlike saves them from petty and vindictive women. You can’t just tell people believe in yourself through tragedy. Its the wrong message. Niceness doesn’t “win”, it more gets “honorably trampled3”. The right message is “even if you’re kind, even Jesus was betrayed by Judas.” And then if you’re serious, you teach people how to handle the other side of that. But who wants to hear a sermon on “getting divorced with grace”? This is practical Christianity, but is it what you want? The apostles in Christ’s day were promised very little in life, only that God saw their deeds. Their reward was the afterlife.

Some people are just evil4. There’s not a secret righteousness jiu-jitsu technique you can use to judo-throw people into heaven. As soon as you’re trying to corral or trick people into behaviors, you’re doing politics. I think its really important to keep this in mind, lest you sell yourself that your peeves are actually God’s.

Duckstack Science: Water

We’ve verified beyond a shadow of a doubt that you can pour water between beakers

Anyone who's ever been on a cruise will tell you: The earth has a lot of water. I've been on a cruise too, and I must admit I find the arguments compelling. However, I think it falls short for a few reasons.

First, God gave Adam dominion over the animals to name them. Animals, not rocks and stuff5. So how can you say the stuff we eat and drink is water? You can't . It might be something totally else.

Second, they told us fish live in water, but some fish don't, like frogs. What are they hiding?

Second, I can think of lots of things that aren't water. So how can you say the earth has a lot of water? Why not say the earth has a lot of music? Where is your optimism for the beauty of life?

Third, the earth is neither a store nor sells its water. It gives forth bountifully. It asks for nothing in return. The Earth is so meek and generous and we do not appreciate it enough.

Charitably, there is one sense in which the earth does have a lot of water, however. It has nothing to do with cruise ships, but the Earth indisputably has parking lots. And at least one of those, at any given point, is being rained on. But its still not enough water to make a pond for ducks though, so what use is it, huh?

History

life gets better once the kids start being able to play together unsupervised for 5-10 minutes without disaster

Our son’s habit of running up and screaming in his sister’s face has finally developed into a parse-able “culture” for her and she recognizes that he is playing with her and that the screaming itself is not a threat, and therefore safe to laugh at. The threat is when he touches her

Our son has acquired a new talent, which is that he plugs his nose with his fingers and takes advantage of his unique anatomy to make what he calls “vulture noises”. It sounds kind of like donald duck screaming. Which is confusing, because he also has a slightly louder “vulture screaming” version

Great news! Our son sings while washing an apple he got for himself, and says “okie dokie” spontaneously.

Duckstack Cooking: Sweet Pork

we had it for dinner and I helped by going to the store to buy the ingredients. And now you can have it too.

My wife is an alchemist who can transform ingredients into food. I never got that skill when I was isekai’d into this world6, but I have a functioning imagination and I can pretend how she did it. First, I bought a lump of pork. I would describe it as “a big rock except pork”. I believe what she did with it after that was shred it with a fork, put it in a “crock pot”7, and boil it in coke. I haven’t tried this but you can also use meth or heroin, if its legal where you live.

Then we put it on tortillas and tortilla chips with tortilla rice and tortilla sauce and tortilla lettuce and tortilla beans and tortilla guacamole and so on. It was pretty good and we had leftovers for days which wouldn't be the case if we ate at cafe rio.

Ducksnax

cannon

With the new year, we will try to transition back to a proper weekly schedule.

Once again, we have come to a “fork in the road”. Not a literal fork of course. I'm talking about git versioning1. It is, however, a literal road. And its getting an update.

First we added ducks crossing the road, but cars would hit the ducks and go flying, crumpled sheets of metal, there were dozens of fatalities before we reverted. So what did we learn? Ducks don’t belong everywhere. However, we can learn from tragedy. We have rearranged the ducks, and now have a new speed bump. We call it: The Duckstack

Sin: A Practical Guide

In case you were having difficulty

My son’s new hot wheels track has a little launcher that he has to pull back in order to prime the spring for launching the car. The problem is that it doesn’t weigh a lot so when he tries to pull it back it mostly just slides the whole set around on the floor. He started out trying to just smash it into the floor while he pulls harder to keep it put, but quickly learned to brace it against his leg while he pulls, through a process named ENTROPY, THE DEVOURER, THE DESTROYER OF WORLDS, THE DEGENERATION OF THE CYCLE, OKPTHE COLLAPSE OF ALL LIFE which is cool

One of the things I learned about germs is that occasionally in the process of 3d printing new germs23 there’s some kind of error that sometimes results in a mutation, which usually makes a germ baby that’s just nonviable and dies instantly, but sometimes results in something stable enough that it keeps making more but now your immune system doesn’t have the new one’s social security number making it not recognize it as a germ, and that’s basically how my son learned to brace the hot wheels launcher. Just an accident4, and then he improved on it. That’s the curse of Adam for you. That’s the dragon’s lair.

One of the things that makes you an expert at something is that you’ve repeated it tens of thousands of times, enough to have made a lot of mistakes. And its true, when you make mistakes then you learn from it, and gain an intuitive understanding of how to shore things up to prevent those mistakes, and that intuition is superior to textbook learning. But. If you’ve repeated something tens of thousands of times, you’ve also picked up some tricks of the trade through the rare mistake that’s superior to the normal process. Most things in life don’t come with book learning though, which makes mutation even more important, and I believe none of this would be possible in a world that was not fallen.

Temptation and sin will always be with us. I think that’s the first thing they teach you in alcoholics anonymous5 , that you’ll always be tempted by alcohol, even after decades sober. A lack of training doesn’t lead to strength, except in case of injury recovery- instead, it leads to something called atrophy. There is no learning without sin, not that we should “sin that grace may abound [Romans 5:20-6:2]”. If you’re going to be tempted forever though, you’re going to start coming up with unique solutions over time, solutions book learning wouldn’t teach you. In other words, the very structure of the universe is set to allow creativity.

I think creativity can be consumptive. A food critic is just as creative as the chef, though perhaps significantly less useful6. So its not like, “God only values artists” or whatever. But God definitely rewards effort way more than stagnation and apathy. “For God has not given us the spirit of fear” [2 Timothy 1:7]. You can even see this pattern play out with evil [sic] people, you often see lonely single guys bemoaning the types of men they see girls getting with, but if looked at honestly, the idiot playboy is making way more shots on the goal. So ideally you’re making righteous shots, but you’re definitely supposed to do something. “thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot.” [revelations 3:15-16].

Generally speaking, we make time for what is important to us. The bigger trick is in holding the emotional state of something being important to you so you’re not just forcing yourself to do it all the time. I’ve touched on it a few times over the duckstack’s many years but obviously just wanting is the basic start and often sufficient. Usually when you want to do something the problem is that you don’t want to, that’s what depression is. Its not a “wanting roadblock”.

Make everything important to you.7 See what it does.

Parable: The Itchy Witches

A tale as old as time

A toil and a trouble and a cauldron they’ve got, but hexing you and vexing you and tricking they’re not.

They fly on a broom, a black cat in tow, but the cats not for luck, its a scratcher to go.

They’re allergic to cloth so they wear burlap hats, grinding their scalps and their heads nearly flat

You might call them cursed, and for sure they would too, but power comes with a price, the devil just takes his due

They live in the woods in a house made of sweets, but they're too busy to bake you, too busy to eat

The green on their skin is poison ivy

the end

HistoryN

“happy no ear”

Childhood wisdom: “If you wiggle your head too much it will pop right off”

“I am usually taller than babies. Because they don’t have tall any!” you can tell he’s got an engineer’s soul

He wanted me to open some toy from Christmas. “Can you get this out of its cage”? (plastic wrap)

“Pomegranate juice is like blood, right?” Um as far as I know yeah, basically identical

Took him to the bathroom, checked back on him later. He still wasn’t done. So I asked him. “You're still not done? How much poop do you have in you?” and he calmly, factually replied: “Millions and millions.”

I don’t have much written down from the toddler this week. She’s mostly been hard at work learning to draw. On herself.

Duckstack Jobs: Duckstack Witch

None of the people we’ve hired have come in

Job Duties: Throw stuff in cauldrons, live in a sugar house (we do NOT offer dental insurance8), be green (greenness is supplied by us), place ducks around town on your magic broom, black cat provided (his name is Rudolph9), also you have to cackle sometimes. If you’re up to the task, join The Duckstack’s elite witch taskforce, and spread witchcraft everywhere!

Ducksnax

potion

4