That's simply not true. COVID caused a 30% increase in heart attack deaths among young adults during the first two years of the pandemic, with undiagnosed myocarditis believed to be the primary culprit. Myocarditis and pericarditis are, respectively, inflammation of the heart muscle and the area around it, caused by an immune response to an infection.

So COVID absolutely can get into your blood, can infect blood cells, and can spread anywhere in your body. It isn't guaranteed to reach your heart, and in fact, serious heart complications are relatively rare, but it can, and COVID-infection-induced myocarditis and pericarditis are both well-documented at this point.

Also, I think you're also misunderstanding how intramuscular injection works. The vaccine isn't put into your bloodstream like an IV. It is put into a muscle. And unlike the virus, which is self-replicating and can move around your body over time, the vaccine infects a cell once and produces output for a specific amount of time before it self-destructs, so unless you get very unlucky and end up with some of the vaccine getting somewhere that it doesn't belong, the overwhelming majority of the vaccine stays confined to the muscle into which it is injected, as do most of the spike proteins. To the extent that it spreads, it mainly ends up in the local lymph nodes. The amount that ends up in random parts of your body is normally very small.

That's why the statistical risk from the virus is considerably higher than the risk from the vaccines. Even though your immune system is attacking those foreign proteins, it almost never is happening in your heart with the vaccine, whereas it is much more likely to be happening in your heart with a natural infection, and that risk increases by something like 11x if you have never been vaccinated because it takes longer for your immune system to realize that it needs to kick into gear and attack the virus.

Yes, that's certainly one way that it can get there, but once something is in your nose, gut, or lungs, the barrier to your bloodstream is minimal. After all, if that were not the case, you would not be able to breathe or absorb nutrients from food.

Either way, the point of that comment wasn't that it gets to your digestive system through the blood, but rather that it doesn't stay mostly confined to your lungs, and can spread anywhere in your body. The lungs aren't really even the primary target/symptom area at this point.

Actually, no. It is believed to be caused by the virus attacking and damaging the epithelial cells that line the blood vessels. The ACE2 receptor just happens to be how the virus gets into those cells, and that's also what makes it sometimes attack the heart muscle in young people and cause myocarditis.

That, coupled with lower bloodstream involvement in general, explains why there's no sign of increased heart attacks or strokes after mRNA-based COVID vaccination. The shots that did potentially cause clotting issues were the ones built around attenuated viruses.

Except it isn't, as I said above.

But even if what you're saying turned out to be correct, the virus would still do exactly the same thing, but with an actual virus behind those spike proteins. So instead of just causing your body to temporarily act like it has gotten a low dose of an ACE inhibitor and have slightly lower blood pressure, it also attacks the cells it hits and kills or damages them. Instead of rare cases of mild myocarditis from those spike proteins interacting with the heart muscle that mostly resolve on their own, you have cases of acute myocarditis often resulting in death.

Any time you have a vaccine whether weakened or mRNA, there's a chance that the symptoms caused by the virus will also be caused by the vaccine, just typically with much lower severity. And the whole point of that vaccination is to expose you at a lower level so that when your body sees it for real, it attacks it more quickly and prevents you from having those bad outcomes.

It gets a pass because it does not purport to be the truth.

When religious teachings are limited to the existence of creator beings and deities and things that you can't see or interact with, no. They're just mythology. When they are limited to how you should behave at a high level, no. They're just philosophy. There are bright lines, though, like telling people how to vote, where religion stops being religion and starts being a political organization under the guise of religion, and that's not okay.

It also starts to become very grey when religious leaders advocate things like vaccine refusal, because that can cause public health crises, like the rather alarming measles outbreak in Texas. I would argue that doing so is crossing a line, because as was proven in that case, even the relative isolation of a religious community is not adequate to prevent a lack of vaccinations from causing a major public health crisis across multiple counties.

Depends. If the scientist's theory provides robust evidence, was authored by someone without a history of publishing fake papers and who has no ties to anyone with such a history, uses math and research methodologies appropriately, and has been published in a peer-reviewed journal that is appropriate for the subject area, then it should be followed up with additional studies to figure out why there is a conflict between the previous studies.

If the scientist's theory provides little more than a different way to manipulate the numbers from other studies (metaanalysis) in ways that contradict scientific consensus, with no new data, was authored by or edited by someone who has authored multiple similar papers that attempt to push a similar viewpoint, is filled with blatant methodology errors that should be obvious to a second-year college student in the sciences or social sciences, and is a medical article published in a physics journal, it should be immediately discredited as complete and utter garbage.

There is a point in the middle beyond which it makes no sense to give something the benefit of the doubt.

When a scientist is repeatedly falsifying information or repeatedly using poor scientific practices with obvious methodology errors or misunderstanding the basic science of what they're talking about while writing a paper filled with pseudoscientific bulls**t in a way intended to fool lay people who don't understand the science into believing it, that's disinformation.

When a journalist reads such a paper and promotes it as proof that their preexisting opinion was right all along, that's disinformation. When this is further fueled and amplified by professional chaos mongers in Russian troll farms, that's disinformation.

Finally, if the "proof" of something is published only in a YouTube video or similar, that one factor by itself is enough to guarantee that it is garbage without even considering any of the other factors above, because it means what they are saying is so obviously false that if someone read it on paper, they would immediately call the author a moron, but they're hiding that tiny bit of dubious information, spread across a one-hour video, because baiting the audience will get more views on their channel.

It does. But the key word here is *healthy*. And part of that requires everyone involved in the conversation having a proper understanding that the vast majority of papers that go against the status quo turn out to be incorrect, either because of methodology mistakes (honest) or because of falsified data (fraud). As long as the folks reading the papers read it with a healthy skepticism, it's fine.

Where it becomes a problem is when a few researchers repeatedly and intentionally create multiple similar dissenting papers with similar flaws, getting retraction after retraction, in an apparent effort to mislead, and then people latch onto those papers as truth and ignore the retractions after major flaws are pointed out, or worse see the retractions as proof of some kind of conspiracy to hide the truth.

Where it becomes disinformation is when people start cherry-picking those dissenting papers, ignoring the mountain of evidence that contradicts those papers, and using only the cherry-picked papers to claim that their fringe viewpoint is the truth and everyone else is wrong. And unfortunately, a certain subset of the media, influencers, etc. were very much doing that, and it got out of control.

That's not healthy debate. That's Fox News and one side shouting over the other, reinforcing people's preconceived notions. That's the opposite of healthy debate, and resulted in people being the opposite of healthy, which is to say, dead from COVID.

I mean yes, ostensibly, but the flip side of that is that a functioning society requires people to do certain things for the good of society that they often don't want to do. Obey the speed limit. Send your kids through a properly accredited school system. Pay taxes. Vaccination is no different.

At this point, we let COVID get out of control by ending lockdowns too early and not taking adequate steps to isolate people with severe immunodeficiency to ensure that they did not become variant manufacturing plants, so further annual vaccination provides limited public health benefit, and mostly serves to protect the individual, with the possible exception of mandates among healthcare workers who work around the elderly. The same is true for the flu shot.

But that is not true for vaccinations in general, and it is also not really true for the initial vaccination, because allowing your kid to die from COVID or grow up without a parent because you did is at least arguably child abuse, and has a very real societal cost. So it is entirely within the scope of governments' interest to mandate vaccinations for certain diseases if you want to be a part of normal society, e.g. requiring your children to have vaccinations before they start school.

The real virus does not stay confined to your lungs, nor even mostly confined to your lungs. Viruses start by attacking the epithelial cells in your nose, mouth, and lungs, but then they quickly spread throughout your body.

Why do you think one of the most common first symptoms of COVID (*before* respiratory symptoms) is diarrhea? Do you think that your lungs just magically asymptomatically swell and push against your intestines? :-)

One of the best ways of tracking the true rate of COVID spread is through sewage testing. You can detect how much COVID virus shedding exists in the sewage and use that as a very good indication of how many people are actively infected with COVID in a region. This has been used almost since the beginning of the pandemic.

COVID causes muscle aches. COVID causes brain fog and neurological disorders sometimes. COVID causes myocarditis and pericarditis at an alarming rate in young people. COVID causes blood clotting that leads to strokes and heart attacks. COVID causes wound dehiscence.

No, COVID absolutely does NOT stay mostly in the lungs. Whoever told you that was so full of s**t that they may need emergency surgery for a bowel obstruction caused by craniorectal inversion.

Literally nobody in his or her right mind has ever said that. What they have said is that cases of actual voter fraud (defined as voting without being eligible) are extremely rare and that the vote counting system is reasonably robust against interference with the actual vote counting process.

But the entire system still depends on people deciding to vote, and can easily be skewed by factors that dissuade people from doing so, like using voting machines that keep breaking, resulting in longer lines at the polls and people having to give up and go back to their jobs.

The #1 reason this is possible is because election day is not a mandatory nationwide holiday as it should be.

The #2 reason is that they don't require polling places to look at the length of the line and when it gets longer than about ten people, and start telling the people at the front of the line, "You can either wait for a booth to open up or I can stamp a provisional ballot with my 'voter verified at polling place' stamp, and you can go out to your car, fill it out, and bring it back to me any time before [closing time]. You don't have to wait in line to return it." They already have the provisional ballots, so this would be pretty close to a zero-cost, zero-effort change that would have no meaningful impact on voter fraud, but would prevent long lines from disenfranchising voters.

I wish you were kidding, but the number of times I've heard the phrase "Can't you just pay people to do that for you" in tech is staggering. And of course, the answer is "Yes, but then I couldn't afford to retire in this gentrified hell market area."

LOL

Goat milk isn't just called "milk". Calling cow milk "cow milk" seems entirely reasonable.

And they fall under that first rule. As long as the word "almond" comes right before "milk" and isn't in tiny print or some other nonsense, it should be fine.

Unfortunately, that's often not the case, and it is likely intentional. The sorts of folks who make veggie burgers tend to be vegan, and there's a very definite subgroup of vegans whose not-at-all-secret goal is to get fewer people eating meat. So if they can fool people into thinking that they are buying meat without breaking the law, they will absolutely do it.

This is not true to the same extent for almond milk and coconut milk, both of which came into existence hundreds of years ago as localized substitutes for cow milk for cooking purposes in areas that had lots of coconuts or almonds and not a lot of dairy cows. They are highly popular for cooking specific kinds of foods that call for them, and they are both also popular among people who are lactose intolerant. Their relatively recent popularity among vegans is therefore almost *entirely* an afterthought, rather than the main reason that those products are made and sold, so you would not expect them to be marketed in a way that is misleading.

I agree. This law is a stupid law, IMO. That's not to say that there isn't a need for a law, just that this one isn't the right one.

The point is not that the harm is huge. It's that people were misled into buying something that they did not intend to buy, and that distorts the free market. That's literally why we have false advertising laws. It really doesn't matter whether we're talking about a $3 container of milk or a $10,000 custom motor scooter. Truth in advertising is a hard requirement for a functioning free market, and when companies play fast and loose with things in ways that actually mislead consumers, that's a bad thing.

So requiring that they be crystal clear that their products are not made of meat is reasonable. Requiring them to avoid certain terms is not, IMO.

The GP said "animal products", not "meat". Dairy is an animal product, because it comes from animals. And it is part of a carnivore diet, an omnivore diet, or a vegetarian (but not vegan) diet. Cats are obligate carnivores, but still love milk (and most can at least tolerate it in small quantities, despite inadequate lactase to consume it in larger amounts). So that part of the post seems fine to me.

I'm slightly more disturbed by the possibility that the milk is exactly like the GP's grandma used to make, but I'm probably misinterpreting that sentence. :-D

Same as the ones they have at work that are made with oat milk. I won't repeat the word in polite company. :-D

I'll grant you that the term "coconut cream" is pretty old (mid-1800s), and ice cream made with coconut cream predates my grandparents. I think the key is in how it is labeled.

If the packaging and advertisements clearly say "coconut cream ice cream", that's clear and unambiguous. Nobody should be confused by that any more than they should be confused by "almond milk" or "soy milk".

If the packaging just says "coconut ice cream", however, that would be massively misleading, because most people would expect that to be dairy-based ice cream with coconut in it (which tastes like coconut meat), rather than dairy-free ice cream made with coconut cream (which likely tastes nothing like coconut meat unless it also contains shredded coconut meat).

Using the word "juice" for coconut milk seems way more misleading. Juice is produced by (optionally cutting and) squeezing a fruit. As I understand it, when you cut and squeeze a coconut without doing anything else, you get coconut water, and not much else.

Coconut milk, could also be described as coconut *broth*, because it's what happens when you grind up the meat of a coconut to a fine purée and then liquify the fat with hot water so that it can be extracted separately. It is is a mixture of coconut oil and coconut water in somewhere between a 1:1 and 3:1 emulsion, possibly with a bit of dissolved solids in suspension.

Put another way, coconut milk is to coconut flesh as coffee is to coffee beans, give or take. Nobody would call it coffee bean juice.

As an aside, the term "coconut meat" dates back to at least the early 1700s, which is yet another example showing why this attempted redefinition of such terms to be exclusively for animal products is revisionist history, and arguably a form of corporate welfare, and runs contrary to the natural evolution of the language. This is not to say that package labeling isn't sometimes misleading, but that doesn't mean we should make it even more so to suit the vested corporate interests of meat producers. :-)

Give app developers the option to simply not offer their apps in Texas, rather than subject their users to this invasion of privacy around the world to appease a few fascist a**holes.

It *should* be no different than showing a bartender. The problem is that we don't have strong data privacy laws in this country that prohibit retaining customer data beyond what is strictly necessary.

Those government IDs should have been sent as data directly to a printer along with the person's user ID, and a human being should have looked at it, pointed their phone at a high-density barcode or QR code or whatever, tapped "Approve" or "Deny", and then put it in the shred bin. Rinse, repeat.

There is absolutely no reason to retain that data for 60 seconds, much less long enough for it to realistically be compromised in bulk. After it has been verified, you no longer need it. A single boolean value is adequate. If a law requires more than that, the law is flawed and must be ignored for the good of society.

They can list to you what the fees are. They can't necessarily list to [arbitrary person known by only a zip code] what the fees are, and doubly so to [arbitrary person known only by a 30-mile radius].

Of course, if they were being honest, they could say for $39.99 + $10.99 or less in taxes and surcharges and give a maximum price. Nobody is going to complain if the price turns out to be cheaper.

Honestly, this doesn't matter even slightly to me. As long as it is *only* government fees that we're talking about, there is no real difference between showing $x in government fees and showing a list of smaller fees. The important part is requiring that they disclose the final total, including the fees.

The only people who care about which specific government fees are involved are the Republicans looking for ways to reduce taxes. So arguably, from the left's perspective, this is is an improvement, because it means various governments can add taxes and fees without getting blamed.

Now if we see them start bundling non-mandatory fees or non-governmental fees, that's where we have a problem. But as long as we're basically just talking about taxes, I couldn't give a rat's you-know-what, and IMO, nobody else should, either.