prismatic-bell:

sarkhan-volkswagen:

indiebooksnvintagevidyas:

swanjolras:

okay jesus fuck this conversation has gone far enough so:

hey, so you like bernie sanders! i like bernie sanders too! i agree with his politics! he is doing better than people expected in the democratic primaries, which is cool!

what are you going to do if he loses?

because given the tone of the conversations i hear on this website right now– given the sheer hatred of hillary that’s emerging, given the overwhelming feeling that bernie sanders is amazing and the messiah and the only candidate that’s worth voting for in america– here’s what i see happening in mid-2016:

• bernie sanders, who despite his better-than-expected performance still has an unbelievably low chance of winning the primaries, loses the primaries to hillary clinton
• the leftist wing of the democratic party (that’s us– tumblr, yeah, but also the whole occupy-black lives matter-third wave feminist-young educated millennials crowd), having spent the past 10 months campaigning against hillary clinton, is overwhelmingly disappointed
• while a few people are willing to bite the bullet and campaign for hillary, energy is low, disillusionment is high, and many leftist americans don’t campaign, don’t donate, and don’t vote (or vote for third-party candidates, like the green party or the peace and freedom party)
• the republican party wins the presidential election.

(i literally shivered as i typed that last bullet point, btw– i know there are people voting in 2016 who were ten years old when obama was elected, and y’all may not remember much of the bush years. i was only 13 when bush left, but jesus christ– remember when hurricane katrina was overwhelmingly badly handled? remember when the patriot act passed? remember when the housing bubble collapsed? remember when the president said god told him to invade iraq? y’all wanna do that again?)

so what are you going to do if bernie sanders loses?

i need you to think about that now. i need you to not be surprised when it happens. i need you to not put all your hopes in one basket.

you think the gop won’t be pouring all their resources into this election? you think the superpacs and the koch brothers and the oil lobbyists won’t be throwing their money at ballot boxes until they spit out the result they want? you think the rich and powerful and conservative won’t be bringing their best game? 

they will, and if we don’t work twice as hard as they do– no matter who the democratic nominee is– we are fucked.

i need you to be okay with the idea of hillary clinton being president of the united states, and i need you to make peace with that before she wins the primaries, so that you’re prepared and ready to campaign for her with all your might if she’s the democratic nominee.

because i honest-to-god believe this country will not survive another four, eight, twelve years of a republican administration.

VERY IMPORTANT.

Whatever happens with Bernie, do not let this country suffer a Republican administration. Do not.

OKAY LISTEN UP KIDDIES

I campaigned for Hillary in 2008. In fact, if she wins the primaries I literally have a political button from that campaign that I kept for history’s sake (it was the first time in history that a woman ran for president and was considered a serious candidate), and if she wins the primary I will damn well break it out again because I would rather have my mentally-deficient dog in the Oval Office than another Republican.

So in 2008, as we all know, Obama took the primary. And I spent about two days being disappointed, and then I called his local office and said “I worked for Hillary and if Obama is good enough for her, he’s good enough for me. I want to volunteer.” I actually showed up on my first day with that Hillary pin still on my backpack.

My primary job with Obama’s campaign was voter outreach. Going into low-registration neighborhoods and asking folks if they were registered and if not, if they’d like to. Telling folks with felonies that in the state of Pennsylvania they were no longer barred from voting and could re-register to vote. Signing people up for rides to the polls if they didn’t have transportation.

In the course of one of those voter outreach trips, I met an old black woman, somewhere in her 70s. I don’t remember her name, but I remember her story. And when I asked her if she was registered to vote, she said no. I asked if she wanted to register and there was this pause, and when she spoke again there was so much shame in her voice I wanted to light the world on fire.

“I can’t read to vote.”

I told her that someone at the polls could help her read the touchscreen so she’d know which buttons to push, and that I could fill out her form if she could make a mark for her signature–and she said yes. So I filled it out as carefully as I could, showed her my voter registration card so she’d know what to look for in the mail, and handed her the clipboard to make her X. Ready for the story part? Are you sure? Because it took everything in me not to cry when she told me, and seven years later I’m sitting here with tears in my eyes.

“I left school in the third grade because they didn’t want to let no black people go,” is what she told me. “I had to work. I ain’t voted in my entire life and I want my grandbabies to know they ain’t got to be like me. You tell that Obama he got my vote. Nobody ever asked me before if I wanted to.”

I dutifully wrote out her story and hung it on our Story Wall in campaign headquarters. It stayed there until the day we closed shop. And the night of the election I was on campus, waiting outside the library for final results to come in because I didn’t have a TV; I was one of only a handful of white students in a sea of varying shades of brown. And then someone came running out the library doors: McCain conceded. Obama wins. Fucking chaos erupted. People were screaming, crying, dancing. Some girl I’d never seen before in my life and never saw again saw the Obama volunteer pin on my jacket and hugged me so hard she lifted me off my feet. It was about 35 degrees outside and we were too excited to care.

And what’s the point of this story? The point is that hope didn’t end with Hillary. In 2008, the fact that Obama beat her was fucking stunning–she was considered the clear front-runner almost all the way up to the primaries.

The point is that if Hillary wins out, you carefully tuck away your Bernie button for 2020 and you call Hillary’s office and say “I voted for Bernie but I would rather have a diseased goldfish in office than another Republican, I want to volunteer.” You make her know she was not first choice, but for the country’s sake we must push the party forward. And we back the shit out of Hillary. Because you may well find yourself standing in line in the polls with a woman who never got to vote before. Because hope has a lot of faces, and some are nicer than others, but above all we must hope. And we must work to achieve what we hope for.

There was a poll recently that asked Americans whether they would vote for a candidate who was _______ and they had “black”, “Muslim”, “atheist”, etc. in the blank. The lowest number of votes went to “socialist”. Shocking, I know. I am prepared to vote for whoever is going to defeat the GOP, even though Bernie is about the closest thing to an ideal candidate I have ever seen.

maneflore:

kingjaffejoffer:

livingabovetherest:

veronica-rich:

systlin:

justkeepswimmingk:

give-a-fuck-about-nature:

systlin:

vegancostarica:

16 oz of honey requires 1152 bees to travel 112,000 miles and visit 4.5 million flowers.

Most of the honey we get at supermarkets and stores don’t come from natural hives. 

Honey is an animal product, produced when bees digest nectar they have collected and then regurgitate it. It is an animal product, just like an egg or milk. Yes, a bee is an insect and not technically considered an animal by many people, but a bee’s body changes the composition of what it ingests, just like other animals.

However, there is another reason vegans won’t eat honey, and that is because it is harmful to another living creature. According to Daniel Hammer, bees do experience pain and suffering while they are being exploited for their products (not just honey but also beeswax, royal jelly, and more). There is simply no way beekeepers, humane or otherwise, can avoid harming or killing bees while they are extracting the bees’ products. Many vegans choose their lifestyle because they wish to avoid harming any other creature, and so they choose not to eat honey.

Check out this couple of articles that are pretty complete about everything around this topic 🙂 

• Why Honey is Not Vegan?
• 3 Reasons Not to Eat Honey > This one explain about the environmental damage and how we are killing the bees.

As a beekeeper, let me say the following. 

As a vegan, you depend upon beekeeping. It doesn’t matter if you never use beeswax or eat honey. You still depend on beekeeping. It is absolutely impossible not to. 

Because here’s the secret; you know all those delicious fruits and vegetables you eat? You wouldn’t have them if it wasn’t for bees, and here’s another secret; those bees were probably either kept by the farmer who grew them for the purpose of pollinating his/her crops, or moved to the farm during pollination season by a beekeeper. 

If you’ve ever eaten a cherry, almond, blueberry, tomato, melon, squash, raspberry, strawberry…hell, most fruits or veggies…you’ve benefited from beekeeping. There is simply no way to avoid it. If you leave it up to whatever pollinators happen to stop in from the surrounding area, your yields will suffer dramatically, which means less produce and less money for the farmer. Therefore, the easy and universally preferred method is to plop a few hives on the property. The girls will make sure that just about every last almond/cherry/blueberry flower is pollinated (They’re VERY good at what they do) and you can happily harvest a bumper crop. This is a universally used practice among food producers. 

And do you know the best way to help make sure the bees survive?

Keep them. Organically, without using any chemicals. And here’s a secret about beekeeping; you inspect the hives whether or not you take honey, to make sure the bees are healthy and doing well. (There are mites and diseases that can severely harm bees, and even as an organic beekeeper who doesn’t use chemicals on her girls there are methods I use to prevent/treat things like varroa mite infestation that can kill an otherwise healthy hive).

And yes, when you open a hive to inspect it, you might crush one or two bees. But tell me, honestly, that you’ve never killed an insect. Bees themselves will kill sick/non productive members of the hive to ensure the health of the hive as a whole; I don’t see how my accidentally squishing one to ensure the health of the other 50,000 is any different. 

And this is what all beekeepers do. And if you, as before mentioned, ever eat anything that isn’t grain-based, this is what took place to put that food on your plate. 

I would also like to point out that bees will store as much honey as they possibly can…which usually ends up being waaaaay more than they actually can use. To survive a log Iowa winter, my bees need about 100 lbs of honey per hive. Well, last year one hive had TWICE that. (I took 50 pounds, leaving them MORE than enough to get through the winter. I just checked on them today; they’re alive and healthy). 

You are NOT hurting them by taking a little honey for yourself, no more than you already are by looking in on them every two or three weeks to make sure they’re healthy. 

And again, if you ever eat any fruits or veggies, SOMEONE IS ALREADY KEEPING BEES TO POLLINATE THEM AND INSPECTING THEM TO MAKE SURE THEY’RE HAPPY AND HEALTHY. 

KEEPING BEES IS NOT WHAT IS KILLING BEES IT IS WHAT IS SAVING BEES. 

WITHOUT BEES YOUR VEGAN DIET IS IMPOSSIBLE.

WITHOUT THAT “EVIL” EXPLOITATION OF BEES YOUR VEGAN DIET IS IMPOSSIBLE. 

AGAIN, BEEKEEPING IS WHAT IS SAVING BEES NOT KILLING THEM. 

SO IF YOU EAT A LITTLE HONEY IT IS HONESTLY NO WORSE THAN EATING SOME ALMONDS AND FRUIT SALAD. 

“Drops mic”

Why can’t bees be protected without taking the honey they produce? I’m all for their protection and I didn’t born yesterday, I know that without bees we all gonna die, but why is it mandatory to steal their honey?

Yeah, that made no sense… You can keep bees without stealing from them. You can keep horses without riding them. You can keep dogs without abusing them. Do people really not get this?

Again, you don’t seem to be getting this. 

Yes. You can keep bees without taking honey from them. But, as I said before, you’re ALREADY in the hive checking for diseases and pests. That, if anything, is what causes bees stress, not you taking a frame or two of honey (each frame of honey can hold 15 pounds!). 

Also, there’s a REASON you take honey from bees, not just because you want to eat it. 

See, like I said before, bees will store as much honey as they can. It’s instinctive. However, there’s only so much room in a hive to put stuff, and honey isn’t the only thing in a hive. They also need room to raise brood, store pollen, ect. Now, if they run out of room, they’ll start feeling overcrowded, which will trigger swarming activity. You can, of course, add more supers (boxes) to the hive, but there’s a limit on how many workers one queen can produce, and you don’t want more supers than they can police, even if all of them are stuffed full of honey. That way lies pests and raiding. So, what we want to do is make sure that they don’t feel overcrowded, while making sure that they don’t have more room than they can take care of. 

When bees feel overcrowded, they swarm. When they swarm, they raise a new queen. The old queen and half the bees will then leave to try and find someplace to start a new hive. 90% of swarms die. As a beekeeper, you don’t want this. 

You can, of course, purposefully let them start raising a new queen and then split a new hive off of the old one if you want to. I’ve done this myself. But this is not always desirable, for many reasons (no more room for more hives, can’t take care of more, don’t have a spare hive body on hand, ect.) There’s also the fact that a recently swarmed hive is susceptible to raiding by wasps/skunks (skunks LOVE to raid hives, the little bastards) or mice, as half the bees that would have defended it before are now gone. You don’t want this either; raiding can kill a hive as quick as disease or pests. (This is why I keep a VERY close eye on any hives that I’ve recently split, and have taken potshots at skunks in the backyard with a slingshot before. Not to kill them, just to scare them off.)

If you don’t want them to swarm, the easiest way to keep them from feeling cramped and give them a little new breathing room is to pull a few surplus honey frames they’ve filled up and replace them with empty frames. The girls will then happily go back to work filling the new empty frames with honey or brood or whatever they decide needs to go in all that new space. They don’t feel crowded any longer, the hive doesn’t swarm and stays strong, everyone’s happy. 

And what, then, am I supposed to do with these three frames of honey I pulled? Throw them away? Hell no. That’s 30-40 pounds of delicious, right there. 

Humans and bees have what’s called a symbiotic relationship. We both benefit from the arrangement. Don’t diss things if you don’t understand how they work. 

And, one more time…keeping bees is necessary for your vegan diet to remain viable. A beekeeper is going to inspect all of those hives anyway, which is the most stressful part of beekeeping for the bees. You are, with your eating habits, (and by that I mean ‘really just eating’, because there’s NO diet that doesn’t rely on beekeeping) reliant on this practice. Taking a frame or two of honey is the LEAST stressful part of inspecting a hive for the bees. 

Source; have kept bees organically for 10 years, help other hobbyists in the area who want to start keeping bees. Garden organically. Generally Actually Know Where My Food Comes From And What It Takes To Get It On My Plate. 

I understand some people want to be kind and compassionate. But there’s such a thing as being ignorantly compassionate, to the point where you forget how to do research, apparently.

^ last comment is important

After the beekeeper wrote out that very thorough and logical post, these niggas really reblogged it talking about “you’re stealing their honey”

I’m so done

damn I just learned so much about beekeeping

Ignorantly compassionate is going into my vocabulary. In exchange, I offer the word apiary, which is where bees are kept.

Damn it why did I let the Tumblr update go through. I SHOULD HAVE LISTENED TO YOU!