What Will We See Today?

note: I (the owner of this blog and maker of wheels) am not into warrior cats! I just thought this would be fun to make

mushroom: can you feel your heart burning? can you feel the struggle within? the fear within me is beyond anything your soul can make. you cannot kill me in a way that matters

I was having a conversation with my dad a while back, and the subject of the police came up because my then girlfriend's abusive ex was squatting at her house and neither of us wanted to call the police. He knows I'm an abolitionist, its probably my single most vocal belief. And he says, "I know you've had bad experiences with cops but they're not all bad."

And thats when it occurs to me that he hasn't just disagreed with me during our past conversations on the matter, he literally was not listening. Or, he wasn't equipped to listen. I'll explain later on.

When I was arrested, I was not treated particularly bad by the police, and I've never claimed to have been. I was white, and I was in the closet. From the back of the van they loaded me into after cuffing me, I saw first hand how much worse they treated the black man they arrested on the way to taking me to jail, not even allowing him the dignity of stepping inside his home to dress.

When a liberal hears someone say ACAB, they think they're hearing someone say, in addition to being a police officer, every police officer is a bad person. They're all corrupt, they all beat their partners, etc. And thats closer to the truth than not, genuinely, but its still not what we have ever been saying.

Its not the fault of the acronym, that would be a goofy claim. But a more accurate one could be ACIAKOHT: A Cop Is A Kind Of Human Trafficker.

One of the main things a cop gets paid to do is traffick human beings to do forced labor. When they do this to trans women, this forced labor is sexual, it is sexual slavery, something that the vast majority of people I love will risk in every single interaction they are ever made to have with a police officer. Its a matter of policy, its called V-Coding, google it. Even in cases where no forced labor occurs, they are committing kidnapping.

Nobody was behind me in line, which seemed to be a good reason for her to treat me to a five minute retelling of the identification, rescue, and argument over initial custody of Kit Kat, who was so small they thought when they first heard him crying for help that he was a bird and not a kitten in a tree, and is now fifteen pounds of "pure, sculpted lardass".

And I didn't mind, precisely, I wasn't bored or anything, but around the time she was bringing me up to speed on Kit Kat's current status it occurred to me that this woman is a cashier in a store that primarily sells candy bars and beverages. People must buy Kit Kat bars from her multiple times a day. Does she do this every time there's nobody in line behind the purchaser? Did I just have that I Own Several Cats And Will Enjoy Your Cat Stories look about me? Was it the first time it occurred to her that she sold the brand of candy bar she named her cat after? Was she new to the job of selling Kit Kat bars?

I was in the same snack shop, which I'm in, like, once a month, recently. I only recognized her because I spent five minutes listening to this monologue in sincere wonder. But I did recognize her, so as I was buying a soda and a Milky Way bar (this time) I said, without thinking about how this would come across, "Hey, how's Kit Kat?"

She looked genuinely horrified and said, "What...how?"

"Oh fuck!" I blurted. "Sorry! You told me about him last time!"

This is still quite cryptic as responses go but she gave me a frankly frantic look of sudden recognition and said, "He's fine! You bought a Kit Kat! I was unmedicated!"

I did not inform her she is small town famous on Tumblr and instead just said, "Glad you're both doing well!" and we parted as confused and mortified friends.

Some points of interest:

Corporate profits are soaring. After taxes, they now take 12.3 percent of national output, far above their postwar average of 7.3 percent.

Adjusted for inflation, hourly wages have risen 3 percent since the end of 2019, Ip noted. Corporate profits over the same period have risen 50 percent.

The Economic Policy Institute calculates that since 1979 the productivity of American workers has grown 90 percent while the pay of the typical worker has grown 33 percent. Had wages tracked output, the average worker would earn $16.40 more an hour today.

The profits are concentrated among the largest corporations. Earnings at the 500 biggest US firms rose 28 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, the fastest pace since 2021, and their profit margins reached 14.8 percent. The seven technology giants known as the “Magnificent 7”—Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Tesla—grew their profits 63 percent.

never had existed if

we were all lizards.