David Tennant's doctor was the one that "burned a regeneration." He had been hit by a Dalek and was regenerating. Luckily, there was a nearby jar containing a hand of his. (This dated from back when Tennant's doctor first regenerated. He lost a hand and used residual regeneration energy to replace it. Another character managed to retrieve the hand and use it to locate The Doctor.) The Doctor used his regeneration energy to heal himself and then directed it into the hand jar so that he wouldn't fully regenerate. This is how a half-human/half-Time Lord clone of the Doctor was formed.

There was another article that I read that stated that Ukrainians were doing just that. Transmitting false orders, telling troops to surrender, or just playing annoying music over the Russian communication channels. Imagine a Russian general trying to order his troops into position only to have the channel flooded with "Never Gonna Give You Up" or "Baby Shark."

Except, for China, obeying the authorities is more important than anything. They wouldn't want "the Rebels" winning because that might give the population ideas about rebelling against THEIR authority. So in a theoretical "altered Fight Club style" ending for Star Wars, the Empire wins and those illegal Rebels see that it's pointless to go against the authority figures as they get carted off to prison.

I agree with this and can give some personal experience (albeit not COVID related). The summer before COVID hit, my mother-in-law fell and hit her head. That started a 60+ day hospital stay that included brain bleeding, strokes, sepsis, gall bladder surgery, and open heart surgery. There were many days when my wife's mother had no clue who anybody was or what was going on. Needless to say, my wife spent almost every day in the hospital with her mother trying to help out in any way possible and helping to advocate for her mother.

This meant that I needed to not only be there emotionally for my wife, but to pick up the slack and do the various things that she would do while also doing everything I do. I would pick up our boys from school, drop our oldest off at his summer job, take my boys into my office so I could do work while they waited, etc. I even had to channel my wife when my oldest son had an unsafe situation at work. I'm not usually good with confrontations. That's my wife's department, but she was unavailable so I had to step up. At one point, leaving the hospital, I got into a car accident with my boys in the car. It wasn't bad (truck didn't stop quickly enough and rammed into me at a stop light), but again I needed to deal with it alone because my wife couldn't get away from her mother and get to us quickly enough.

The whole situation was stressful for everyone for a multitude of reasons. 60+ days was bad enough. Now imagine if this was for a few years or for life (since we don't know how long Long COVID lasts). Imagine needing to do everything because your partner can't go from the bed to the couch without needing to catch their breath. Imagine your partner having to do everything because you can't seem to hold onto a thought. In fact, imagine just trying to hold down a job with these issues. I can speak from my 60+ day experience and say that stress levels would be through the roof and you'd feel emotionally drained the entire time. You do NOT want to be in that situation!

"This isn't included in the right to X so doing this doesn't infringe on a person's right to X."

I want this to be a joke, but that's seriously how it's done. In the case of the call phone passcode and the 5th Amendment, the court would simply rule that the passcode isn't included in the 5th Amendment and that forcing someone to give it out doesn't count as them testifying against themselves. Not that I agree with this (I don't), but this is how the courts would justify allowing this while still "not infringing" on a person's rights.

Sadly, while we like to think that our rights are inherent properties, they only encompass as much as the courts/government says they do. This isn't anything new either. This was true from the start where certain people weren't given rights because of the melanin levels in their skin. (Again, I don't like this state and would push back against it, but it doesn't help to ignore the reality of the current or past situation either.)

The locals in that area already use it as a garbage bin. For you and me, we get rid of our trash by putting it on the curb and a truck comes by to whisk it away. For many areas, there is no garbage truck/garbage man. They are just too poor and/or too remote to have garbage collection services. The trash needs to go somewhere, though, so they dump it in a pile that eventually makes its way to local rivers. The rivers sweep the trash away from the town preventing them from drowning in trash, but causing "trash rivers."

Mark Rober had a recent video about these rivers and about the robots being used to grab the trash before they reach the oceans. Of course, it doesn't solve the root problem of the areas too poor/too remote for trash service, but it helps keep the problem from spreading into the ocean. Problems like these will need multiple layers of solutions. Trash collection in the oceans to remove plastic/debris that wound up there. Trash collecting robots in the "trash rivers." And programs to bring proper trash collection service to these areas so that their trash doesn't end up in the rivers in the first place.

The analogy I always use are malls. These are "public spaces" in that you can generally gather there with your friends. You don't need to purchase a membership or sign a formal agreement before entering the grounds. However, it is still private property. The mall can decide to eject you for pretty much any reason. Maybe some reasons (you're black or you kissed your same sex partner) could get them in legal trouble over the ejection, but apart from federally protected groups there's no limit. A mall could decide that a pro-Republican t-shirt is grounds for ejection. Another could decide that a pro-Democrat t-shirt gets you banned. Their property, their rules. Twitter, Facebook, etc. are the same. They decide the rules and if you don't abide by them you get banned.

I will concede that sometimes the rules seem to be bent for some people. By all rights, Trump should have been banned much earlier. There was an account that took Trump's tweets and tweeted them out word for word. (No retweeting, just copy-paste.) That account was quickly banned - not for copying Trump, but for the content of their tweets. Social media networks seem to bend their rules to placate some rich and powerful folks. That shouldn't be the case, but that only would make Trump cry "censorship" more as many Republicans would end up banned.

The fact that Trump's new social media service will ban anyone who criticizes them or Trump is completely their right, but it undercuts their claim to love free speech (as in letting people speak their mind as opposed to the First Amendment Freedom of Speech).

The reporter once ordered Chinese food and since you are what you eat, that makes him a Chinese hacker!

"I put those naked selfies in an unmarked manila folder on the break room table. That person who opened the manila folder to see what it was clearly violated my privacy by seeing the photos before closing the folder quickly!"

I've been eating kosher Morningstar "fakin' bacon" for years.

This isn't true - at least for kosher goods. You can call a fake meat product "pork" and have it supervised as kosher. Morningstar made a veggie pulled pork that was marked as kosher. I've never tried it so I can't vouch for how good it is (and it looks like it might have been discontinued), but it was available and was marked kosher.

Really? You're able to make up your own mind as to what to take for medical ailments and what dosage? Doctors go through years of training to diagnose issues and to know what to prescribe. Pharmacists go through years of training to be able to fill prescriptions and to ensure that they won't conflict with other medication being taken. Both are required to continue training every year to stay up to date. Do you really think you would be able to decide what medication you'd be able to take for a certain ailment, what dosage, and whether or not it will react with other drugs you're taking?

Do you have the time to do research on EVERY drug you take, the side effects, and dosage? If so, you're an outlier and I congratulate you on the massive amount of free time you have. Most people, however, do not have the time to reach piles of medical studies - much less the ability to know what they mean - and to weigh the various study's pros and cons to decide on a medication and dosage to give themselves. If everyone was left to just "decide for themselves" what random medication to take and how much, we'd have people dead from accidental overdose, others dead from drug interactions that any halfway competent pharmacist would have spotted, and tons of others addicted to substances they shouldn't have taken in the first place.

The COVID-19 vaccine components are broken down by the body in 6-8 weeks. The only thing that remains after that are the memory immune system cells that know to look out for the COVID-19 spike protein. There is no way for the vaccine to have an effect on you months or even years after this "breakdown window." It would be like claiming that your stomach started to get upset today because of Indian food you ate 6 months ago.

It's used to treat humans for parasitic infections, not for viral infections. Also, a prescription is required. Since no reputable doctor will prescribe the drug to treat COVID-19 (or they'd lose their medical license), the conspiracy theorists are flocking to the livestock stores to get non-prescription animal Ivermectin. Of course, the dosage for that is not meant for humans and taking that version is the height of stupidity.

As for studies, there were a few that were retracted due to non-disclosed conflicts of interest. The people doing the study had an interest in Ivermectin being sold. That would be like a study claiming cigarettes cured cancer conducted by a guy who neglected to mention that he ran a company that sold cigarettes. Once that was revealed, you wouldn't exactly take the "study" seriously. As far as I know, the only anti-viral tendency that Ivermectin has shown is when the dosage was so high that it was dangerous. A lot of stuff might stop COVID-19 but also kill the person that takes it. That doesn't make for a good medicine and that's why doctor's won't prescribe it. Vaccination remains our best weapon against COVID-19.

And just to add that those "thousands of deaths after vaccination" comes from the VAERS data. Any event that happens to occur after vaccination gets added to that database. If a man with a history of severe heart attacks gets vaccinated and then, a week later, dies of a severe heart attack, his death will be recorded in VAERS even though the vaccination is highly unlikely to have caused his death. When researchers comb through VAERS to find issues with the vaccinations, they weed out instances like my hypothetical example and look at what's left. When conspiracy theorists look at VAERS, though, they include every death no matter how unlikely that the vaccine actually caused it.