Konijiphyta live in dry and rocky deserts in remote areas of the world. In their typical form they can be hard to tell apart from the quartz pebbles they live among – until the light hits them! Then they scatter rainbows all around them!
Because of the water they have stored within them to adapt to desert conditions, their body acts like a raindrop – breaking the light into all of it’s colors. The eyes on their surface are actually remnants of an older time and not able to see anymore – they always keep them closed. Their true eyes are deep in their bodies and can analyze the various spectra that come to them – which allows them to tell how much moisture is in the air and what kind of gems are in the rocks around them. Sometimes they can even predict how soon rain will come!
If they want to move (which is rarely) they can pull their roots into themselves and roll like a ball.
When it is exposed to any sort of nectar – it thinks there might be other flowers around and enters it’s blossoming form! In this form it changes it’s type and puts out a large flower. The colors of the flower are taken from the colors it has seen so far in it’s life. Those who smell the honey-like scent of the flower can get glimpses of the rainbows it’s eyes have seen recently and understand what they mean.
When in it’s blossoming form, the Konijiphyta is no longer able to roll freely, so it turns two of it’s roots into small legs. These cannot necessarily move far, but can be quite fast in short distances.
Most of them live elsewhere, but there are some that live on the Alolan Islands on bare slopes of volcanoes or in rocky patches!
In countries where workhouses no longer exist (or exist in only highly disguised and mutated forms), they no longer exist because the people in these countries decided workhouses were horrible and not an acceptable response to poverty.
I’m sure that in the heyday of workhouses, they felt as inevitable as institutions for disabled people feel to lots of people today. Lots of people probably even thought they were a good thing – and the only possible way to do certain good things.
A lot of people think the solution to institutions is to cure disabled people.
It’s not.
Disability will always exist and has always existed.
Institutions did not always exist and will not always exist. They are not necessary. There is not a single good thing done inside of them that can’t be done outside of them, and better.
Nursing homes, developmental centers, mental institutions, group homes, orphanages, all these things and more do not have to exist. (This includes the worst of the “home care” agencies – only “home care” by name – that are basically institutions where the inmates live in separate places scattered all over town. And other forms of what I call “community institutionalization”. It’s possible to provide care without an institutional power structure. Really.)
Literally do not have to exist.
All we frigging have to do is understand that not living in a hellhole (and even a painted-up hellhole with lots of perks that doesn’t feel to some people like as much of a hellhole, is a hellhole, also Stockholm syndrome is a thing) is a basic human right.
And if it’s a basic human right for everyone to live outside institutions. And if it takes a certain kind of assistance for certain people to live outside institutions. Then that assistance is a human right. Assistance should never, ever be offered in a way where you can only get it if you agree to be institutionalized. Just like food should never, ever be offered in a way where you can only get it if you agree to live in a workhouse (or join a religion, or etc.).
TL;DR: THERE IS NOTHING NECESSARY OR INEVITABLE ABOUT INSTITUTIONS SO EVERYONE PLEASE QUIT ACTING LIKE THERE IS.
A snippet from an article on Huffington Post about what it means to be working poor.
Pretty spot on…
I got into an argument today with someone who is a landlord, and they were outraged, outraged, to find that their evicted tenants owned an Xbox 360. Never mind that the console was ten years old and worth perhaps $50 on Craigslist, they were outraged that their evicted tenants did not sell it, along with the very clothes on their back, to pay their back rent. I tried to explain to him that when you are $1800 in back rent, $50 isn’t even a dent in that debt. Why bother? Why bother selling that $50 item if it isn’t going to get you any less evicted? If it’s not going to save you, you’ll hold on to it. Money becomes meaningless when you’ll never have enough to hold onto. You just let it flow like water through your hands. It’s all gone anyways, no matter what you do. It was gone before it ever touched you.
The other day I got very mad at someone because their justification of why a family didn’t deserve their council house was because they had decorated the front of their house with xmas lights. DO YOU REALLY KNOW WHAT ITS LIKE TO LIVE WITH NO SMALL PLEASURES AT ALL?!?!? DO YOU REALLY?!?!
This is one of the great end results of capitalism: we treat people as if the only thing they should care about are their mechanical needs but without things to nourish the soul or the capacity to talk about same, we fall apart.
We aren’t meant to be things which sit in blank boxes waiting to be used by our employers. Nothing in nature acts that way. Nothing’s meant to.
The need rich people have for poor people to constantly perform some sort of Dickensian display of abject poverty is so goddamn disgusting and proves that, yes, it is all about status markers. Rich people want visible proof that others are beneath them. It’s malicious and nauseating. And the kicker is that they’re usually too busy being impressed with their own wealth and sense of superiority to use their brains, because as already stated in the other comments, having technology or a couple of small pleasures is *not* a reliable indicator of income. This anti-poor people shit is revolting.
And it turns poor and working-class people against each other. Like I knew a guy who installed cable TV for a living and barely could make a living, and resented that some people who got cable TV were on welfare. I tried to explain that you actually have to spend a certain amount of money in order to qualify for such basic thing as Medicaid – if you save money you’ll get thrown off the system, even though you won’t magically be able to survive outside the system with the amount of money you have to save in order to be thrown off it. He didn’t care. He told me poor people should be given nothing more than food, clothing, and shelter. He grew up poorer than most poor people have ever been. All this combination of shit made me furious and still does. Not to mention the cultural ideals of being too proud to accept help of any kind and how people think this is a good thing even when it kills people.
The poorest people in the world forgo some amount of necessities for staying alive in order to have some money for recreation or things that connect them to the world. During the Depression, many people surveyed said they would rather give up their beds than their radios – radio being how people stayed connected to the outside world in the same way Internet does today. And does anyone need to bring up Rat Park again? Holy crap this stuff pisses me off.
(– Poor person who has Internet & Netflix & smartphone & other so-called luxuries. And does anyone really think the extra $100ish a month I’d get giving all that up would catapult me out of poverty and solve all my problems? Not to mention the Internet has literally saved my life before. As in, I was in the hospital being mistreated in a way that was life-threatening, and blogging allowed me and another poor person who was making decisions for me, to get other people to call the hospital and say “We’re watching you.” Other poor people get food and rent and etc. money by asking on the Internet and receiving food money through the Internet. Many people on disability supplement their income by selling art or small crafts online – how much you’re allowed to sell before they start cutting benefits depends on what part of the system you’re in, but it’s a common thing.)
Yoooooooo. This is lit. Like, actually really lit. Thank you for sharing this news.
If I didn’t it doesn’t look like anyone was going to lol
I didn’t hear a thing about it (but again, I’m NOT up to date with really anything nowadays it seems). Again though, thank you so much for sharing this.
My boyfriend talks in his sleep and because he’s bilingual, he says some hilarious/weird/sometimes creepy shit. I ask him every morning if he remembers saying this stuff and he has no idea about any of it.
Here are some of my favorites:
-”Babe, can you please turn down the brightness of your skin” -After stealing all of the blankets: “This is my right as a human” -After I take the blankets back: “I don’t want your freedom, America. Just blanket” -Sometimes he just says “Hello?” as if he’s answering a phone call -One night he just said “Cabbage” which is weird because he doesn’t know the english word for that when he’s awake. -After spooning me: “You have a nice butt” -”Who is that in the corner?” (terrifying) -”Watch out for the red lady” (even more terrifying) -Sometimes he will say things in German and it sounds like he’s speaking Parseltongue -One time I actually think he said something in Parseltongue -One time he talked about buying a ticket to “everywhere” and then just said “hello?” after two minutes of silence -And my all time favorite: ”This is MY yogurt, Satan”
If that photo doesn’t terrify you then you don’t understand what’s going on
This photo is more threatening than the ones where they were being pulled out of their chairs and zip tied
[Tweet from ADAPT reads, “he had them sent to jail without their wheelchairs clearly senator portman doesn’t care!”
Image is a police officer pulling an empty motorized wheelchair (mobility scooter?) down the street. Another officer and empty chair are in the background.]
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
You must be logged in to post a comment.