DrakeAngel

A funny thing about introducing a new queen into a hive that has lost its queen (or one that you’ve killed because her brood was too fighty). 

You have to introduce the new queen into the hive with these special queen cages that are stopped up with candy, and are open enough to let the hive smell the new queen, but not open enough that they can get in there and kill her.

Because they will kill her. 

When you first put the new queen in she smells like an intruder, but by the time it takes the bees to eat through the candy and free the queen, the queen’s pheromones will have had time to work and the hive will have gotten used to her.

From the outside this kinda seems like: 

Something terrible starts to happen all around you, all over the world. So many people are infected so fast, and now suddenly the person you love most is infected, and she’s in distress, so you rush to get her help but not a single expert or authority figure around you has the capacity to tell you what to do. Your wife dies, right in front of you, and there are so many bodies everywhere that you’re seeing them on the street. You stay in your house because you have to hope your house is safe, but 800 million people just died and even if you don’t know that exact number just yet you can extrapolate from all the horror you’ve just witnessed in your own city.

And then, the next morning, it’s a bright sunny day and everyone (who lived) wakes up and tells you it’s over, we did it, so sorry for your loss. Yup, everything is okay, we lost a couple, but we’re good now. Would you like to go back to normal? 

Even the other ‘unaffected’ people in the world look at you like you’re insane when you bring up how bad the situation was. Well, MY family is intact and I want to be happy, so let’s make peace with the world as it is. We just want to be happy again, and, look, everyone is ready to pretend with you. 

“When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me – it still sometimes happens – and ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don’t ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous – not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance… That pure chance could be so generous and so kind… That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time… That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me and it’s much more meaningful… The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived.

That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday.

I'm taking it all as propaganda, and I'd encourage you to do the same.

I absolutely support Palestinians, from the very bottom of my heart. I'm sickened and devastated by what's going on. I've donated what little money I have to spare.

But y'all. Harris at least is calling for a ceasefire. Trump said Israel should finish the job. He said he wants generals like Hitler had. He genuinely, truly, deeply wants a genocide, both here and there.

Not voting, or god forbid, voting for Trump, will make things infinitely worse. If he wins, it's all over. And his running mate is worse.

VOTE BLUE

I DO NOT CARE WHAT THE POLLS SAY

GET UP AND VOTE

Polls can be deceptive. Polls can be wrong because they don't reach a representative sample. The margin of error can be as high as 3 percent. Voter turnout is key most of the times because people in polls say who they would vote for but that doesn't mean they will vote at all.

And also, even if Harris wins, every vote counts. Just imagine she wins the electoral college but Trump wins the popular vote.

Back in Ye Olden Days when phones were a thing attached to a wall and phone spam didn't exist, people picked up the phone every time it rang. And because there was no phone spam, the social norm was that you didn't just hang up on someone--calls were important. So if a pollster called, you answered their questions.

And then came cell phones, and phone spam. And young people started screening their calls and just not answering unfamiliar numbers.

As long as middle-aged and older people still answered their phones, and as long as young people didn't often vote, it didn't matter much to the outcome of polls. You could very easily get a representative sampling of people who were likely to vote in a given region just by calling random phone numbers in that region and asking if they were likely to vote and if so who were they going to vote for.