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This isn't a purity thing. This is a "everyone stand with us against destroying the environment and giving asthma to poor people" thing.

Did you know that when one community says no to an AI data center, they specifically search out communities with fewer resources? Communities that can't defend themselves? And the pollution 100 percent affects their health and wellbeing, in addition to burning through our already scarce drinking water.

kid: complete?

me: do you see a P in that word?

kid: uh.... compare?

me: where are you getting a P??? sound it out.

kid: com... complete?

me: is that a P after the M? sound it out.

kid: *stares blankly*

Which is a fucking insane approach to reading, by the way, and I could rant about this forever because this makes absolutely no sense and I cannot figure out how the entire educational field was duped into thinking that this makes a lick of sense.

The word was "disagreement."

He made a couple of guesses - some nonsensical, but after pushing him to sound out the word, he got closer. He kept saying "dis-age-ment" and "dis-argue-ment."

And I said okay, let's break this word down. Is there anything in here you recognize?

"The beginning is 'dis' and the end is 'ment' like argument, but I don't know the middle."

Great! Let's pull the middle out. I wrote the word "agree" on the page. Do you know this word?

"Age? Argue?"

SOUND. IT. OUT.

"Ag... agriculture?"

Jason the love of god. I drew a line in the middle. Ag/ree. Sound out each part.

"I don't know."

JASON. I wrote them out on opposite sides of the paper. Ag...........ree. What sound does ag make?

"Ag?"

YES GREAT FANTASTIC. Now come all the way over here. Ree. Sound it out.

"Are?"

JASON. R. E. E.

"Rey? Ree?"

Yes, thank you, it's Ree. Put it together.

"Ag...ree? Oh! It's disagreement!"

As much as I wish that was the case, "Jason" and all of his classmates are students in a strongly blue state with some of the highest educational spending per student in the country.

Link to their IG post

Important!

Wool farming, if done with an eye on animal welfare*, does absolutely nothing to harm a sheep or alpaca. It’s no different than a haircut. And just like a haircut, it’ll grow right back. If your argument is that sheep may be cut in this process—very occasionally a sheep may be nicked. To be clear, I say NICKED, not cut. Think about shaving your legs or face and hitting a bump, and ow, you bleed a couple drops. That is what may, rarely, happen. But RARELY, because farmers are going to take damn good care of the animals who keep them in funds. Should it happen, it’s as much an accident as you finding that bump while shaving.

Likewise y’all should be promoting ethical beekeeping and honey farming. Bees are unique among livestock in that if they don’t like their keeper, if they think the hive is shitty, they can, and will, just…leave. You can’t put a collar or ear tag on a bee. Bee populations are declining and they’re incredibly important in our biodiversity (as pollinators, yes, but also in other ways). And bees do, indeed, make too much honey for themselves. That’s why they swarm. A nest gets too full of comb, or they outgrow it, and they just dip. Swarming is dangerous because it leaves the bees vulnerable—the queen is mostly unprotected, they have only as much food as they could carry with them so if it’s late in the season they’re dead meat, humans spot swarms and freak out and send exterminators because they don’t realize swarms aren’t dangerous as long as you’re calm….it is, BY FAR, better to have bees in a hive that never overfills, where they can be checked for parasites and diseases that would destroy the colony or even an entire apiary and can receive honey substitute rather than starving to death if winter should be particularly harsh or long, and where an excess of their natural product and instincts can be siphoned off for the benefit of humans with no detriment to the bees.

Honey is less harmful to us and to the planet we live on than agave syrup, stevia, or cane sugar. It does not rely on any kind of slave labor (again: if the bees weren’t happy, they’d leave). It does not upset entire economies. And by its nature there are more independent keepers than there are giant conglomerates, which is better all the way around! (Although the conglomerates are trying to change that, so like. Support your local beekeepers.) Plus, old no-longer-needed honeycomb is made of beeswax, which can be used in all manner of things in lieu of more harmful chemicals like phthalates. There is no downside here!

“Never do anything involving an animal ever” should not be the goal. That completely ignores that we are animals that grew up in a complete ecosystem. “Do the least amount of harm and be good stewards, because this planet doesn’t belong to only us” should be the goal.

Wool and honey. We can argue another time about eggs. For right now let’s agree that sheep, goats, alpacas, and bees make far more of these products than they will ever need, that in some cases an excess can even be detrimental to them, and that it is a GOOD THING to find a way to live in balance rather than poisoning our world with “vegan leather.”

This is bat friendly street lighting, which not only looks sick as fuck but allows bats to pass through without disturbance, as they cannot see red.

Camera rotates to reveal bat has been hanging upside down above a human doing the exact same visual gag and each ruined the other's bit.