How many duckstacks can dance on the head of a pin?
We are pleased to announce the establishment of the new Duckstack Bank, now open for business1 to subscribers and unsubscribers alike! As you may know, duckstacks are worth exactly one cent. So simply bring your duckstack email into the bank as collateral, and you can exchange it for $0.01¢ worth of Duckstacks. Just click any link at the bottom of the page to go to any other Duckstack, and the transaction will be complete. We’ve got it set up for infinite transactions and we’re minting new duckstacks weekly.
Additionally, The Duckstack Bank offers several select services for subscribers. For example, members can write vibe cheques. Get out your vibe checkbook, and just slam it into people’s hands or desks. They can come over to the Duckstack website to redeem it for a duckstack. They can do this no matter what financial institution they belong to, as duckstacks are a universal currency2.
The Duckstack Bank also offers a long line of credit to you, the reader, who makes all this possible.
Lucifer The Morning Star
When you wish upon a star, make sure it isn’t falling
Fascism, on some level, is the willingness to say good things are good, and liberalism, on some level, is to say “but what if you're wrong?”. You can easily see use cases for both and why people would have dispositions to lean one way or another.
I don’t know if America was founded as a “Christian” nation because I don’t really care that much what the founding fathers thought. But it was certainly meant to be theistic, since the pledge of allegiance has “under God” and all that stuff. They didn’t really feel the need to ask “which religion”, which bothers non-christians a LOT
There is this current event going on where a guy named Daniel Penny is on trial for choking a black guy to death, which bothers some people a LOT. And I don’t think most liberals really feel the need to ask “but did he deserve it”. And I know we hear a lot about how racist it was, because the black man happened to be homeless and violent, but I don’t think its even really about the racism in my view. The problem with this instance, and the thing that tipped liberals off to be mad about it, was the vigilantism, which is also what got them mad about the Kyle Rittenhouse thing even though there was no racial angle there at all. Kyle shot three times and hit three sex offenders, but he didn’t have authority to administer justice. It wasn’t the self defense, it was the unauthorized justice. Because you see, if we let just random people choke out felon drug addicts or shoot sex offenders or whatever, then random people would make mistakes, guaranteed. Or worse, they would start just executing everyone they don’t like. “what if you’re wrong”
I know, this sounds insane to most of my readers, who are going “are you kidding? You think the justice system is going to be better? Have you seen the justice system lately?” And the answer is probably no, most people live in echo chambers and if the only things they hear about the courts are “the villain lost again!” then there’s not really any reason for them to have a negative opinion of the whole thing.
So it becomes tempting to take matters into your own hands, by being really obnoxious about the whole point. Take Satanism for example.
America has religious freedom, and some people don’t like that, so they created satanism, a fake and ridiculous bundle of yelling that they stuck the “religion” label on and then their whole thing is to inject themselves into anywhere religious freedom exists and go “its religious freedom, you have to honor this.” Of course no one, Satanists themselves most of all, think its real or “does anything”. Its just provocative. If mom has a rule that your brother can hit you if you hit him first, you are going to spend all your time trying to get him to hit you first so that you get permission to hit him. Its the top tactic in rebellion psychology. Its called “malicious compliance” and you should add it to your vocabulary. Paying fees with pennies. You will actually see these behaviors, ironically, in Satan himself, all the time. He was the original rebel, rebelling against our Father’s plan for our Salvation in the pre-existence, and a lot of what he does comes from that framework. “I am doing what has been done in other worlds.”
So you had a satanist incident in Ohio where the government put up this “exhibit to satanism” in the state capitol since they let religious exhibits in the capitol so they have to let satanists put one up. And it became a huge incident and a bunch of unnecessary conflict because they couldn’t discard the liberal value of religious freedom. Because they're unwilling to say “no, our thing really is better and we're willing to favor it at an institutional level” So a bunch of resources and conflict was allowed to be brought forth by institutional indecision and playing pretend with a bunch of whiners. It could have been avoided.
I don’t wish to discourage you from ever rebelling, of course. Sometimes rebellion truly is just. And it feels good and “the big guy” usually actually is an oppressor on some level or another. But The Thing is that when you do things like this you want to be really sure you’re not using Satan’s tools3. God gave us an easy check for that kind of thing in the D&C to Joseph Smith: Before you start doing anything in the grey area, first be sure you’ve properly exhausted all legal channels. This protects yourself and helps keep you blameless on a procedural level, just through habit so you don’t need to worry. I don’t think this means we should comply and pretend support when we don’t support something, you want to make your positions as clear as possible without causing problems, until there’s no way to continue. Then, generally speaking, you should pray, and God will send angels to do the slaughtering for you, because you did everything you right, and God’s justice demands he balance the celestial ledger.
In the case of the Satanist display, this sort of obnoxious performance/malicious compliance/institutional defection is not a recipe for positive change- what its a recipe for is “if I can’t play ball, nobody can”. Probably the government will put in a rule that nobody can have religious exhibits in the capitol anymore. That’s a very happy outcome for Satanists, and not a happy outcome for all the religions who legitimately benefited from the prior policy. So if you’re going to do any sort of similar tactics you have to think about where it leads4. Is it going to make life better for anyone? If the thing you’re attacking is legitimately damaging, maybe, but maybe its a chesterton’s fence and you would actually need that institution later. Its important to compose yourself with mercy, which is why Latter-Day Saints generally shouldn’t bible bash, or try to tear down other Christian’s faiths, and all these other things we’re taught to do, we’re supposed to be builders, and that means destruction, when necessary, should be done with a firm hand, but great regret.
10 dating systems that don't exist because I made them up
Dating not working? Just swap out your country’s cultural operating system for something else
Divorce rates might be approaching something like 50% nowdays. That’s a hard statistic to get accurate because a lot of those are second marriages, and a lot of people aren’t getting married in the first place, they’re just living together and having kids and acting like they’re married, and when those relationships fail it doesn’t get bundled into divorce statistics, but if you can imagine our current system failing at a >50% level to establish good relationships, then that leads to some intriguing mathematical possibilities!
Assign a spouse at random: If people’s natural selectors aren’t working, then random chance is more efficient! Just roll a dice, explain to her that more than 50% of selected relationships fail, so giving you a chance represents better than average odds567. There are no downsides.
Everyone loves E-Dating. But life is a spectrum, not a binary: What tindr needs is ranked choice dating. You get a subset of people in your area that you can put a slider on their desirability to you, and then the system spits you out an optimized match based on a very utilitarian number! Then you’re married instantly, of course. A few generations of this system and we’d probably get some really interesting dating optimization data. If it turns out its a bust, then instead of getting married instantly you start dating instantly, and then you get three mulligans.
Whoever has the longest hair gets married
If a man sees a beautiful woman, he must set up a pottery wheel and spin a fine bowl. If the woman likes it, she takes a flower from her hair and puts it in the bowl. If not, the man acts like he just felt the urge to make pottery, and it had nothing to do with the woman.
A giant laser from space that blasts a mile wide crater if you catfish
The women approach men. The man is ambushed in his sleep by her laying at the foot of his bed. If he covers her with a blanket, then you’re married now. I don’t really remember how the book of ruth goes
The women do not approach men. Instead, if she sees a cute guy, she bats her eyelashes at him, brushes his forearm with hers, or plays with her hair. The men, oblivious, think no women want them.
Hestory
We’ve made incremental steps towards potty training and several steps sort of perpendicular
We attended a cancer charity ball thing for our kids this week, and Jethro told us, “sometimes, when I hear the music, my body just starts dancing.” This seems to go for his brother too, who spun and spun.
Jethro asked me this week: “Papa, who do you think is better at fighting villains? Dinosaurs? Or Bluey?” he pronounces villains with a w. “willains.”
My wife had a couple days of sciatica, which means "hip-ish pain” and she got stuck while walking to the kitchen and Jethro was like “Mama. Move!”. Mama, through gritted teeth: “I’m trying.” Jethro then flawlessly incorporated this into his world view and provided a solution that usually works for him: “Well. Maybe you need to learn more.” It came out very sassy so it was sort of a funny situation of my wife doubled over in pain and him just being so incredulous why she didn’t just solve the problem
The toddler is starting to learn to draw. He did a scribble ball this week, and told us its “A shark! Inna waters”.
The toddler is getting better quickly too though- he drew a straight line and told us its a snake. Not the only thing he told us was a snake this week, but this is a family friendly publication.
We also got the toddler to pee in the potty this week, not for the first time, but there haven’t been many. He did very well, and then he started to panic because it had stopped. “The pee! Not working!”
The toddler has also been taking to wrapping himself in a blanket. He wandered in today with it wrapped all around him and told us “I so cozy.”
Ducksnax
Cacti
such as it is. this “business” business
nobody has ever told me otherwise
“Satan the Accuser.” “Satan the liar.” “Satan the Rebel.” “Satan the proud”
This is a lot easier if you’re not angry
women love to date men based off of mathematical probabilities, I tell all my single friends “carry a blackboard around with you”
I don’t actually tell them this
except just barely