Coiling Cores

Anything is elastic, if you wrap it up tightly enough

A Duckstack on a hill cannot be hid

Art: Dariusz Klimczak

Alert, one of The Duckstack’s tier C scientists has entered the zone. We advise everyone to follow lockdown protocols while he remains in this extremely zen state, just pouring beakers and, looking at clipboards, with an extremely precise rhythm. As this state continues you may see spillover effects into the real world, in this case, objects turning into slime. This is a dangerous and abnormal situation to be sure! “Why don’t you stop him?” Its what we pay him for

To the person whose speakers next to his computer have just dissolved into slime, we are sorry. We are sure this will degrade your audio output considerably. Try imitating the speaker output yourself, with your lungs.

For the person whose trash outside their garage has just dissolved into slime, we are sorry. As a courtesy, we have dissolved the trash inside of it also.

For the person whose pants have just dissolved into slime in front of the class on the first day of school: You are dreaming, don’t worry, this happens all the time.

For the person whose Duckstack letter just dissolved into slime: no refunds.

The Arc Of History

like a tesla coil

Animals, when scared, will act against their self interest. The fear of consequences invokes the animal in us¹. What I want to analyze is the mindset driving so much outrage over the recent court decision to let people not do abortions if they don’t want to- remember, anger is reaction to a situation you don’t feel you have the tools to deal with. And there is a lot of anger here.

You can plot a lot of bad stuff in society to starting in the 1970s, and a lot of laws passed there were very big and generally speaking very opposed by Christians: No fault divorce, federally mandated abortion access, women entering the workforce en masse, to name a few, among many. This week, Christians knocked down the first idol that has been knocked down in America in over 50 years: Ending child sacrifice².

Solomon in times of old took a harem, and the harem led him astray, but in large part Israel remained clean, until Solomon, indulging his women, built up shrines to their gods³. This idolatry cost him the kingdom, and set off a chain of events spanning centuries and the entire books of kings and chronicles in the Old Testament: The shrines caused the people to evil, and though occasional righteous leaders and kings were appointed, most left these “high places” alone- and the Lord did not prosper his people. You see, the shrines caused wickedness, not the other way around.

The mechanism for this isn’t important- maybe the people saw the shrines and figured “its there, might as well use it”. Maybe the shrine keepers distributed propaganda and leaflets to passers by. Maybe the shrines invited demons to hang out in the city and the demons would just… Talk to people, until they found the margin cases that were willing for whatever reason to listen. Either way, it was the act of toppling the shrines that solidified the people in righteousness, and even good leaders, if the shrines were left intact, allowed much wickedness. This is important because wickedness causes misery- to the extent it ever flows the other way around, the codependence is deeply entangled.

Hookup culture causes misery. Single motherhood causes misery. Promiscuity, hedonism, pride, homosexuality, cause misery. Drugs cause misery. Here is what I think has happened.

Men like sex, and women want support. Stability. Not all women want someone to “protect them” but in old times you were guaranteed these things with sex⁴. Not so today. With no fault divorce⁵, women feel like marriage is not a stable thing- and now women sleep around, following their sex drives to men who they would like support from, cashing their currency of “sex”, and getting in return: nothing. The men don’t commit, a bond isn’t actually formed. This tension runs, straining, throughout almost everything in our culture. This is not a simple issue. Women rely on abortion as a safety net because their holy and natural impulses no longer work. So now the court is threatening to remove this safety net (sort of, but sort of is a lot when your whole way of life is wrapped in it) causing mass panic. And when you’re afraid, you act against your self interest. As one friend put it:

“They want “reproductive rights” because they are terrified of cases where they get pregnant and men abandon them, but they can’t understand how the pre-commitment to murdering babies exacerbated the conditions they are trying to guard against”

This same principle happens with divorce- the very act of leaving the escape hatch open for the marriage weakens the marriage by definition. The same principle happens with “living together to try it out before marriage”. You don’t practice commitment by explicitly not committing. You don’t practice a piano piece with a false passage and expect to naturally remove it in the actual concert. I’m hesitant somewhat to write on gender issues on The Duckstack so far, but as I have written once before, fealty or loyalty, is a huge deal for a man, one of the main things their sex drives attempt to secure. The men are by and large not happy with promiscuous hookup culture either.

But how do you heal a culture? You cannot do it grass roots- that ends up the benedict option, simple withdrawal and living in huts waiting for the storms to blow over in the mainland.

The way to change culture is to throw down idols and destroy them, removing people’s faith in them, forcing a leap of faith when confronted without escape hatches to the impotence of one’s worldview.

Our prophets in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints do not have political power, so they focus instead on building temples: wildly, feverishly, half size, half constructed, outhouse temples but no less sincere, micro temples, lining the landscape with them, in a desperate attempt to stave off the wrath of God by building beacons to attract 100 or even 10 righteous, pleading for virtue to drip by osmosis into the lives of the citizens, until someday, someone, smashes the idols⁶, and tears down the high places, ripping the intravenous drip lines of raw poison from the nation’s bloodstream, so that healing can begin again. The first step is to stop hitting yourself.

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STATEMENTS ON ROE VS WADE BEING OVERTURNED

We asked, and you listened, and we heard you, and now you’ll listen again, because we’re listing them.

• “I think this is a great acceleration of tribalism between states” -Cnepa

• “Abortion is a sin.” -YauponHolly, child of the covenant

• “I only wish it had happened on Juneteenth” -possessed rocking horse

• “The Nimstack is pleased by the courts decision” -anonymous

• “I, Ryan Gosling, stand by the court's decision to to uphold American values of life, liberty, andthe pursuit of happiness” -Ryan Gosling

• “This is what George Floyd would have wanted!” -Scepter

• “T'was the ultimate double header.” -The top gun of 1991

• “Release opinion on roe vs wade before the riots” -Laura the cellist

• “harlots incensed” -Solozehenehixorn

HISTORY

It seems like the whole world is on fire but really its just our friend’s package that he sent to our house

The Littlest one got a hold of a bell pepper in the store, which it turns out is also a good teething toy. This sabotaged the plans for cooking it though. Messily.

My wife texted me with “amazing news”: “The Littlest One has discovered talking into tubes (like the vacuum hose attachment) and our house is filled with little distorted baby noises”

"I'm going to make you a bagel. That's so nice of me"

My wife took the kids to a museum or something and got a lot of pictures that look like the kids playing together, instead of what was really happening which was the Little One playing off to the side by himself while the Littlest One contemplated eating him.

“Is your birthday coming up?” “uh huh.” “How old are you going to be?” “Big” irrefutable

The Littlest One has started going “om nom nom nom nom” in place of chewing, he is also learning how to climb ladders and teleport up stairs.

Got a good video this week of the Little One dumping legos on himself “its raining legos” and then putting them all back in the bin so that he could dump them on himself again, over and over

During conversation someone asked the Little One if he was upset and he said “no, I’m me!”, he’s dishing the dad jokes decades early

He has also come up with a evil fairy tale villain version of the old “got your nose” game: “Gonna take your eyes!”

1. 2 Timothy 1:7“For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.”

2. Very rational, dispassionate, and most of all principled child sacrifice, of course. Not that anyone would care if anyone turned out to be for example eating the aborted fetuses. That would be positively irrelevant.

3. 1 Kings 11:7Then Solomon built a high place for Chemosh the abomination of Moab, on the hill that is east of Jerusalem, and for Molech the abomination of the people of Ammon. 8And he did likewise for all his foreign wives, who burned incense and sacrificed to their gods.

4. In the old testament, you had to marry your rapist, which sounds awful to us today but the system guaranteed lifetime support to a vulnerable and possibly pregnant woman who had just through no fault of her own lost an extremely valuable status marker in her society, and by that token, most of her bartering power both politically and in relationships.

5. playing with one of God’s very first commandments: Thou shalt cleave unto thy wife, and they twain shall be one flesh

6. Midrash Bereishit 38:13Abraham's father, Terach was an idol-manufacturer. Once he had to travel, so he left Abraham to manage the shop. People would come in and ask to buy idols. Abraham would say, "How old are you?" The person would say, "Fifty," or "Sixty". Abraham would say, "Isn't it pathetic that a man of sixty wants to bow down to a one-day-old idol?" The man would feel ashamed and leave.

One time a woman came with a basket of bread. She said to Abraham, "Take this and offer it to the gods".

Abraham got up, took a hammer in his hand, broke all the idols to pieces, and then put the hammer in the hand of the biggest idol among them.

When his father came back and saw the broken idols, he was appalled. "Who did this?" he cried. "How can I hide anything from you?" replied Abraham calmly. "A woman came with a basket of bread and told me to offer it to them. I brought it in front of them, and each one said, "I'm going to eat first." Then the biggest one got up, took the hammer and broke all the others to pieces."

"What are you trying to pull on me?" asked Terach, "Do they have minds?"

Said Abraham: "Listen to what your own mouth is saying? They have no power at all! Why worship idols?"