birds & bees 💉💉💉

i hate vegans for this reason. you spout “i care about the earth and the animals and health” and blah blah blah yet insist on eating the worst possible shit for the planet. like fuck off with “cow farts are killing the ozone layer” and start thinking about your own damn footprints. i’m not gonna quote 100 articles at anybody but it’s a well known thing to ecologists and environmental scientists. (i’ll admit, no form of milk production is good for the environment but don’t pretend your nut juice is ethically and environmentally innocent.)

Almond milk: quite good for you – very bad for the planet

Like quinoa, another staple of hip “health” obsessives before it, production of almond milk also appears to have a hefty environmental impact. More than 80% of the world’s almond crop is grown in California, which has been experiencing its worst drought on record. It takes 1.1 gallons (5 litres) of water to grow one almond, and thanks to the big profits they bring in, almond orchards continue to be planted (this isn’t to say cow’s milk, which takes about 100 litres of water to produce 100ml of milk, is more environmentally friendly – more that its production is not concentrated in one area of the globe).

Last year, an apocalyptic piece for Mother Jones by Tom Philpott, who has long detailed the environmental ravages of this crop in California, summed up the problems: almond farmers drilling thousands of feet down into aquifiers to pump out water has resulted, in some areas, in subsidence of around 11 inches a year, which “threatens vital infrastructure like bridges, roads, and irrigation canals” and could trigger earthquakes. Furthermore, insatiable demand for almonds is harming honeybees, already an embattled species. Almond trees need to be pollinated but bringing in 1.6m hives to California every year, “into an area dripping with insecticides is a recipe for disaster” writes Philpott (up to 25% of the hives were damaged in 2014), including whole colonies killed off; this spring they fared better after guidelines were issued about pesticide-use during the trees’ blooming season). It’s enough – or should be – to make anyone spit out their almond milk latte in alarm.

and FINALLY

I have each students pretend they got hurt and need a band-aid. Children love band-aids. I ask the first one where they are hurt. If he says his finger, I put the band-aid on his finger. Then I ask the second one where they are hurt. No matter what that child says, I put the band-aid on their finger exactly like the first child. I keep doing that through the whole class. No matter where they say their pretend injury is, I do the same thing I did with the first one.

After they all have band-aids in the same spot, I ask if that actually helped any of them other than the first child. I say, “Well, I helped all of you the same! You all have one band-aid!” And they’ll try to get me to understand that they were hurt somewhere else. I act like I’m just now understanding it. Then I explain, “There might be moments this year where some of you get different things because you need them differently, just like you needed a band-aid in a different spot.” 

When I was 10, my mom made me wear a bra and it felt like a punishment for being different.

When I was 10, I took the bra off when changing for gymnastics and accidentally dropped it in the school hallway. A teacher picked it up and said, “Oh, this must belong to you” and handed it back to me in front of everyone. I quit gymnastics.

When I was 11, I thought maybe the boobs would be okay so long as they didn’t get any bigger than would fit in my hand, so I kept measuring it, but they did.

When I was 12, I started wearing two or three sports bras to smush them down, until one day a classmate said, “Are you wearing two bras?!” while laughing.

When I was 13, a boy told me he wanted to squeeze my boobs “until they popped.”

When I was 14, I got cast in a play as an older character and a classmate told me I got the role because I had boobs.

When I was 17, my mom told me to return a swimsuit because it would be too distracting for my boyfriend’s father.

When I was 21, I got properly fitted for a bra and everyone felt the need to tell me how much better my boobs looked.

When I was 26, I got pregnant and my immediate fear was that my boobs would get bigger.

When I was 28, I got shamed for trying to feed my screaming baby in public without a cover.

When I was 28, people asked me “why are you bothering to use a breastfeeding cover?”

When I was 30, people gave me weird looks that I wasn’t yelling at my kid for putting their hand on my boob.

When I was 31, I avoided going to the beach or pool because I didn’t want to have to deal with boobs in a swimsuit.

When I was 32, I got asked, again, “why don’t you get a breast reduction?”

When I was 33, I watched a 5yo girl get shamed for running around in sweltering heat without a shirt on and had to reprimand a bunch of tween boys who thought it was okay to shame her for doing something they do all the time.

When I was 34, my kid kept patting my breast and saying “Mommy’s squishy breast!!” They will never see me express any shame about tits, because I want them to have a different mindset than I had. Yes, boobs are nice! They’re squishy! They’re fun! That’s the end of that.

I’m 35 and no longer give a fuck. I don’t care anymore. As a teenager my tits were covered in stretch marks. They’ve been engorged with milk. My nipple changed shape with pregnancy. Give it another couple decades and my breasts will probably be all wrinkly. It’s sexual when I’m using it sexually. I don’t fucking care, and I won’t be ashamed anymore. 

Every time a policy or cultural hangup treats people with breasts differently, it fucks us over. 

Tumblr’s new policy makes an active choice to participate in this culture of shame. By classifying “female-presenting nipples” as explicit material, Tumblr has taken a stance that any chest or breast that differs from a male default is worthy of shame and unavoidably sexual. The idea that breasts are shameful and unavoidably sexual is exactly what fucked me up for so much of my life.

Here’s the thing: I’m a nerd. I want to be able to automate things in our home and to have usable data. So I want smart electrical plugs that allow me to have rules and show me what’s hooving up a ton of energy. That’s useful to me, but that’s not the bargain that tech companies are willing to strike with me, because they want to be able to gather data and sell it.

What’s annoying as hell is that every currently supported thing that does this wants to be a cloud-based application that requires me to install an app on my phone.

I. Do. Not. Want. This. 

I want my plugs on a network so I can flip open a browser on my laptop or phone or tablet and access them that way. I do not want them on or touching the goddamned internet. I do not want an information-gathering-and-data-leaking-phone-app.

The one thing that I’ve found that semi-reliably does this is no longer supported by the manufacturer. Every other goddamned option requires me to have it be app-controlled and I can’t control the data gathering from the manufacturer.

“Smart” and “Cloud” also mean data gathering.“

A woman working at an OB/GYN office, who was a breast cancer survivor, asked Dr. Barry W. King to look at a lesion on her vagina

The woman was concerned her cancer returned so she turned to King for help

King examined her, and afterwards told her to have her husband look at it later 

Once home she used the bathroom and noticed the toilet paper was purple

She recognized the purple as gentian violet, which is a dye used to treat different medical conditions but thought it wasn’t used anymore

When she went back to work, King acted giddy and confessed he pranked her 

She realized King also told several other people she worked with about the ‘joke’

She said in court she believes he was hoping she had sex with her husband and that it would dye his penis purple as part of the prank