Leonis

I would like to put forward the suggestion that the tigers in question are like this:

I'm just saying, Neo-Nazis, whose fascist ideology demands the eradication and extermination of the Jewish people, and those other individuals whose professed political ideologies promote egalitarianism, environmental stewardship, worker rights, and the uplifting of the human condition, and are thus traditionally placed on the Left side of the political spectrum, should be easier to tell apart when it comes to them talking about Jews. You know. Ideally.

Six day week is superior to seven because a prime number week is stupid. There's a lot of things that people like to do every second or third day; in a six day week, this is always the same days each week.

All months are the same length. Advantages obvious.

Thirty days is a good round number for a month; it can be divided into so many smaller numbers. Convenient for things that need to be done regularly; you can do them on the same days each month and have the gaps between them all exactly the same.

Every month in a given year starts with the same day. If the 3rd is a Wednesday, every 3rd will be a Wednesday. This is a massive help in scheduling bullshit that ends up happening "second Tuesday of every month" or whatever, and also helps people track regular monthly things (if you have a monthly meeting on the 15th, it's going to be the same day of the week every time). Fitting weeks perfectly into months just offer so many improvements for scheduling and remembering stuff.

The days move back with each non-leap year -- if the 1st of every month in 2025 is a Tuesday, the 1st in every month in 2026 will be a Monday. (This also happens with out current calendar as neither 6 nor 7 fit into 365). This means that if your birthday is on a Monday or whatever, it won't be that way every year -- only the same day of the month WITHIN THE YEAR (2 years in a row for leap years) is the same. (I bring this up because last time I mentioned this people didn't do the math and thought that the days of the week would be consistent across years, somehow, mysteriously).

That's us, together.

While we're looking up at the Artemis II astronauts journeying to the Moon, they're looking back home at us. 

In this image, Earth peeks through the capsule window, reminding us that a view like this relies on the ingenuity and hard work of countless people back home.

In the second image, we see our home planet as a whole, lit up in spectacular blues and browns. A green aurora even lights up the atmosphere.

Bruce is one of the richest men in the world. Bruce does not want to be one of the richest men in world.

He starts by implementing high starting salaries and full health care coverages for all levels at Wayne Enterprises. This in vastly improves retention and worker productivity, and WE profits soar. He increases PTO, grants generous parental and family leave, funds diversity initiatives, boosts salaries again. WE is ranked “#1 worker-friendly corporation”, and productively and profits soar again.

Ok, so clearly investing his workers isn’t the profit-destroying doomed strategy his peers claim it is. Bruce is going to keep doing it obviously (his next initiative is to ensure all part-time and contractors get the same benefits and pay as full time employees), but he is going to have to find a different way to dump his money.

But you know what else is supposed to be prohibitively expensive? Green and ethical initiatives. Yes, Bruce can do that. He creates and fund a 10 year plan to covert all Wayne facilities to renewable energy. He overhauls all factories to employ the best environmentally friendly practices and technologies. He cuts contracts with all suppliers that engage in unethical employment practices and pays for other to upgrade their equipment and facilities to meet WE’s new environmental and safety requirements. He spares no expense.

Yeah, Wayne Enterprises is so successful that they spin off an entire new business arm focused on helping other companies convert to environmentally friendly and safe practices like they did in an efficient, cost effective, successful way.

Admittedly, investing in his own company was probably never going to be the best way to get rid of his wealth. He slashes his own salary to a pittance (god knows he has more money than he could possibly know what to do with already) and keeps investing the profits back into the workers, and WE keeps responding with nearly terrifying success.

So WE is a no-go, and Bruce now has numerous angry billionaires on his back because they’ve been claiming all these measures he’s implementing are too expensive to justify for decades and they’re finding it a little hard to keep the wool over everyone’s eyes when Idiot Softheart Bruice Wayne has money spilling out his ears. BUT Bruce can invest in Gotham. That’ll go well, right?

Gotham’s infrastructure is the OSHA anti-Christ and even what little is up to code is constantly getting destroyed by Rogue attacks. Surely THAT will be a money sink.

Except the only non-corrupt employer in Gotham city is….Wayne Enterprises. Or contractors or companies or businesses that somehow, in some way or other, feed back to WE. Paying wholesale for improvement to Gotham’s infrastructure somehow increases WE’s profits.

Bruce funds a full system overhaul of Gotham hospital (it’s not his fault the best administrative system software is WE—he looked), he sets up foundations and trusts for shelters, free clinics, schools, meal plans, day care, literally anything he can think of.

Gotham continues to be a shithole. Bruce Wayne continues to be richer than god against his Batman-ingrained will.

Oh, and Bruice Wayne is no longer viewed as solely a spoiled idiot nepo baby. The public responds by investing in WE and anything else he owns, and stop doing this, please.

Bruce sets up a foundation to pay the college tuition of every Gotham citizen who applies. It’s so successful that within 10 years, donations from previous recipients more than cover incoming need, and Bruce can’t even donate to his own charity.

But by this time, Bruce has children. If he can’t get rid of his wealth, he can at least distribute it, right?

Except Dick Grayson absolutely refuses to receive any of his money, won’t touch his trust fund, and in fact has never been so successful and creative with his hacking skills as he is in dumping the money BACK on Bruce. Jason died and won’t legally resurrect to take his trust fund. Tim has his own inherited wealth, refuses to inherit more, and in fact happily joins forces with Dick to hack accounts and return whatever money he tries to give them. Cass has no concept of monetary wealth and gives him panicked, overwhelmed eyes whenever he so much as implies offering more than $100 at once. Damian is showing worrying signs of following in his precious Richard’s footsteps, and Babs barely allows him to fund tech for the Clocktower. At least Steph lets him pay for her tuition and uses his credit card to buy unholy amounts of Batburger. But that is hardly a drop in the ocean of Bruce’s wealth. And she won’t even accept a trust fund of only one million.

Jason wins for best-worst child though because he currently runs a very lucrative crime empire. And although he pours the vast, vast majority of his profits back into Crime Alley, whenever he gets a little too rich for his tastes, he dumps the money on Bruce. At this point, Bruce almost wishes he was being used for money laundering because then he’s at least not have the money.

So children—generous, kindhearted, stubborn till the day they die the little shits, children—are also out.

Bruce was funding the Justice League. But then finances were leaked, and the public had an outcry over one man holding so much sway over the world’s superheroes (nevermind Bruce is one of those superheroes—but the public can’t know that). So Bruce had to do some fancy PR trickery, concede to a policy of not receiving a majority of funds from one individual, and significantly decrease his contributions because no one could match his donations.

At his wits end, Bruce hires a team of accounts to search through every crinkle and crevice of tax law to find what loopholes or shortcuts can be avoided in order to pay his damn taxes to the MAX.

The results are horrifying. According to the strictest definition of the law, the government owes him money.

Bruce burns the report, buries any evidence as deeply as he can, and organizes a foundation to lobby for FAR higher taxation of the upper class.

All this, and Wayne Enterprises is happily chugging along, churning profit, expanding into new markets, growing in the stock market, and trying to force the credit and proportionate compensation on their increasingly horrified CEO.

Bruce Wayne is one of the richest men in the world. Bruce Wayne will never not be one of the richest men in the world.

Ted Rosenberg quit teaching geriatric medicine after 30 years because his employer, the University of British Columbia, was too tolerant.

In the days and weeks following the Hamas massacre of innocent Israelis on October 7, 2023, students and colleagues alike in his academic community posted fiery condemnations of and expressions of moral disgust toward … Israel. Rosenberg felt that some of these messages crossed the line into bigotry. One note accused Israel of harvesting the organs of murdered Palestinians. Another, from a medical-school resident, warned of a sinister, unnamed group of people “pulling the strings, who have orchestrated every war to ever happen, the ones who profit off of death and sickness.” “ The way I saw it,” he told me, “that level of demonization put the whole Jewish community at risk.”

He did not resign because of the messages, though; he resigned because the university wouldn’t do anything about them. “ I tried to meet with the dean,” Rosenberg said, “and he said, ‘If you feel you’re being discriminated against, put it through the DEI program.’ So I met with the head of the diversity, equity, and inclusion program within the faculty, and she refused to acknowledge that anti-Semitism was an issue. They view Jews as white within their DEI framework.” The faculty of medicine’s dean at the time, Dermot Kelleher, referred Rosenberg to UBC’s Equity and Inclusion website. Rosenberg searched the site for the words anti-Semitism and Jew. Neither appeared.

In his letter of resignation, he wrote, “I have no faith in due process in a faculty that does not even acknowledge the existence or presence of antisemitism/Jew-hatred.” After Rosenberg’s resignation became the subject of media attention, the equity committee of the department of medicine of UBC added a note to its website: “Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia will not be tolerated.”

Hatred against Jews in Canada has spiked to historic levels since October 7. It’s a crisis commonly measured via violence and vandalism. More synagogues in Canada in the past 28 months have been desecrated, burned, shot at, or threatened with bombings than in any other country. Jews in Canada are now statistically more likely to be victims of police-reported hate crimes than any other minority. A Jewish girls’ school in Toronto was shot at on three separate occasions. A Jewish grandmother was stabbed in a kosher supermarket in Ottawa, and a mother in Toronto was assaulted while picking her child up from a Jewish day care. Police have thwarted a half-dozen extremist murder plots since October 7 against Jews by Canadian residents.

These incidents have generated news coverage and sympathetic statements from mayors and members of Parliament, whose proclamations that This is not who we are as Canadians have become commonplace.

Documenting and denouncing shootings and arson attacks are easy. But it’s harder to account for stories like Rosenberg’s, where Jews exit public life without any glass or bones being broken. How many Jewish academics, health-care workers, teachers, and arts-organization employees have left institutions because they no longer feel welcome or protected? Nobody is counting. The diversity statistics collected by these organizations rarely include “Jewish” as a category of self-identification.

Here’s what can be said for sure: 80 percent of Jewish doctors and medical students surveyed by the Jewish Medical Association of Ontario reported experiencing anti-Semitism at work after October 7. In 2024, more than 100 Jewish doctors stopped acknowledging their affiliation with the University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine in protest of what they saw as a failure to protect Jewish students and faculty. Almost a third of Ontario’s Jewish doctors say they are considering leaving Canada because of hostile work environments, according to the JMAO survey.

A group of Jewish teachers in British Columbia filed a human-rights complaint against their own union, accusing the BC Teachers’ Federation of ostracizing, bullying, and silencing its Jewish members. A federal report into Ontario’s K–12 schools found nearly 800 anti-Semitic incidents reported in elementary and high schools since 2023, many relating to the conduct of teachers.

One hundred thirty-five cultural organizations across Canada joined the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement against Israel. The Toronto International Film Festival dropped a documentary from its lineup that told the story of an Israeli grandfather’s experience rescuing his family from Hamas on October 7, before an outcry forced its restoration. A Jewish film festival was postponed in Hamilton, Ontario, when the theater hosting the event backed out, citing “safety concerns.” The cartoonist Miriam Libicki was banned from the Vancouver Comic Arts Festival out of “public safety concerns,” because years earlier, she had written a book about her time serving in the Israel Defense Forces. (The festival later reversed course and apologized.)

And then there’s Canadian politics.

In 2023, the mayor of Calgary broke with a long-standing local tradition and refused to attend a City Hall Hanukkah-menorah lighting; she said the event had “political intentions” because it “had been repositioned to support Israel.”

The awkward reality is that a main driver of these incidents is a very Canadian aversion to causing offense: The deference of many politicians and institutions to the views of a rapidly growing minority community is too often leading them to reject another minority community. Although relatively few Canadians hold negative views of Jews, opinion polls have found that such views find greater levels of support within the Canadian Muslim community. From 2001 to 2021, the Muslim population of Canada more than tripled, to about 5 percent of the population. Just 4 percent of non-Jewish Canadians agree that Jews are largely to blame for the negative consequences of globalization, but that figure rises to 28 percent among Canadian Muslims, according to a survey conducted by the University of Toronto sociologist Robert Brym. Similarly, only 16 percent of Canadians believe that it is appropriate for opponents of Israel’s policies to boycott Jewish-owned businesses in Canada, but that claim finds support among 41 percent of Canadian Muslims.

Canada is also the birthplace of a new educational framework called APR—Anti-Palestinian racism. APR was developed by the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association, and in 2024 the Toronto District School Board, which serves more than 230,000 students, voted to integrate APR into its wider anti-hate strategy. Although a new policy against racism might sound benign, many Jewish groups argue that in practice, APR can function as a form of discrimination and censorship. For example, a group of Toronto teachers had been given APR training by their union, in which they were told that it would be racist, and therefore forbidden, to ask why Arab countries don’t help Palestinians. To the claim that the phrase From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free carries genocidal implications toward Israel, the APR training suggests responding that “Palestinian chants and poetry exist to give Palestinians hope, and are not for others to define.”

David S. Koffman, a historian at York University and the editor in chief ofCanadian Jewish Studies, writes that Canada’s Jews are turning inward. “Our assumptions about safety, trust, acceptance, and solidarity have been punctured,” he observes. As a result, he says, more Jewish parents are enrolling their children in private Jewish day schools, and job applications at Jewish organizations are rising.

Which is not to say that Jewish spaces are safe from external judgment and scorn. An anti-Zionist website called The Maple published lists of the names of Canadian Jews who have served in the IDF, as well as the names of Jewish children’s schools and summer camps with which they were associated. The author of these lists, Davide Mastracci, wrote that “the complicit segment of Canada’s Jewish population deserves blame for what they do, not who they are.” Weeks after the list was published, five pro-Palestinian groups launched a campaign to revoke the accreditation of 17 Canadian Jewish sleepaway camps. The groups accused the summer camps of supporting “genocide” and called for “a gigantic change.” Then, both synagogues listed by The Maple as complicit Jewish institutions were shot at.

Among my Jewish friends and family, these efforts to intimidate and alienate Jews, to exclude them from civil society and from public life, and to close down private Jewish spaces are discussed with far more concern and frequency than the regular reports of graffiti and name-calling. Five Jewish families pulled their children from the downtown Toronto public school in my neighborhood last year, after a series of controversies. At least four Jewish journalists left the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest newspaper, after the paper’s ombud on discrimination and bias wrote a social-media post questioning “who did what” on October 7, and reposted another criticizing North American Jews for “centering their feelings.”

When I first moved out most my meals were instant ramen. Then I started adding 1 egg to that ramen to get a little protein in. In a couple months, 1 egg became two. Then it was 2 eggs and 1 chopped green onion. Then a couple months later I was adding carrots and other vegetables. In about two years I was able to skip the instant ramen part altogether and now use chicken broth and noodles and I’m basically making a ramenesque soup from scratch when I’m craving ramen. It took 2+ years total of just gradually, one at a time, adding one ingredient. Over a period of months/weeks.

Start with where you’re able. If a sandwich is too much, maybe try just a piece of bread and some meat or cheese. Focus on where you can be gradually introducing more nutrients into your body. 1 slice of deli meat. A couple weeks later, that plus 1 slice of cheese. Then 1 vegetable. Maybe they don’t all make it into sandwich form and that’s ok. But if you keep what’s the most basic and simple for yourself and slowly add 1 thing that’s not too much of a hassle, over a couple months you might start toasting the bread before putting cheese and meat on it. Then one day there’s more vegetables. Years down the line you might find yourself owning a panini press or slicing your own bread.

Most of us will never be gourmet chefs and that shouldn’t be the goal. You might not ever get to the point where you own a panini press. But the more important thing is that you’re finding ways that work, for you, gradually, in order to make your meals more nutritious. The expectation to cook a full, unique meal every night for dinner is a relatively new phenomenon and completely unrealistic for most people. Having the same 3 things you can make consistently and keep on rotation is plenty fine, especially if you get to the point where you can mix it up a little bit by adding ingredients in the method stated above. Feeding yourself should be the #1 goal, getting more nutrients in #2, and stepping it up to the next level #3 when you have the capacity to. Like with a lot of things, it’s really just about consistency. Start with where you can be consistent. If that’s 1 meal a week you cook yourself and the rest is hot pockets, but you can do that 1 meal consistently, then that’s where you start. Then when you have that down, maybe try two (of the same) meals a week, or ask what you can add to your hot pocket to make it a little better for you. (Some vegetables on the side for instance).

"Is this public information? Like can I talk about it?" was his first question and grinned ear to ear when the answer was yes.

"and this is single-ready-to-mingle Joy??"

"Uh," I peer at this man like he's grown another head and is now discussing the logistics of double kipped wearing. "Sure?"

He giggled, maniacally may I add. And then refused to elaborate for the rest of the evening.