If you’d read the article you will see that this is a report from a network of church abuse survivors and the person speaking has first hand evidence from speaking to Prevost. If you discount them, you are basically saying that witness statements count for nothing. You are silencing the victims.

You will also know that Prevost blocked the ‘real investigation’ you claim you want and this is core to the point of the article.

Yeah - there’s actual video evidence of it exploding! Unfortunately that means that it no longer exists, so that would explain why it’s absent from the Pope’s blessèd gun rack.

Woah there, that’s leftist woke propaganda, talking about human wills and desires. I was brought up apolitical so I’m sensitive to these things - I can only vote for the Republicans because every other party is just too political.

/s

Current research show children in the UK and US on average consume 60% of their calories from UPF. So, to your point: Yes, and it’s backed with stats.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11346253/

In developed countries such as the UK and the USA, UPF represents more than 60% of the calories consumed in children’s and adolescents’ diets. In some Latin American countries such as Chile and Mexico, it is more than one-third of the total calories consumed by children 1–19 years old

the Western Diet could still be plant-based, if all the only definition is “high-fat, low-fibre”

and low diversity. A key point is that more variety of plants provides a wider range of nutrients to the bacteria.

There was definitely a chance of being denied entry (with possible strip searching), but the usual consequence was being sent back to where you came from on the next plane and never being able to come back. Weeks in ICE custody and concentration camps are completely new.

Absolutely!

Right now there’s a non-zero chance of being detained, stripped searched, probed and held in a prison cell without access to safe food and water for an unknown length of time before being deported. Hopefully not to a death in a Columbian hellhole.

I don’t know about you, but even if that is a tiny chance, I’m not risking myself or my family unless it’s really important.

That’s either inviting a social superior you’re not intimate with to bed, or a request for group sex.

As others have said, open communication is critical. It is necessary but not sufficient.

You’ve probably been thinking through why you cheated and continued to cheat. However it can be really difficult to go deep get the true answer by yourself - brains tend to generate reasons/excuses in a way that minimizes your responsibility and preserves your ego as best it can. If you try to explain what happened to your wife and give a facile or self-serving excuse, you could make things far far worse.

Many people find that the process of talking with a professional (a counsellor or therapist) can get deeper than doing this by yourself. You will get to a more profound and authentic understanding of yourself and of steps you can take to be the better person you want to become. By knowing yourself better you are able to properly apologise and explain to your wife why you betrayed her trust. You will also be able provide some evidence that you are not going to do this again. Broken trust takes a long time to repair - self discovery and improvement is a process, not a single event.

Another thing to consider is whether you and your wife can have constructive conversations about what happened and what your hopes and wants are for the future. If conversations rapidly devolve into arguments and anger, it may make things worse (but every relationship is different). If you worry that those conversations may spiral out of control, or will not be productive, I’d suggest doing this with a neutral, professional third party like a relationship councillor who can facilitate the conversation.

Those are a few ideas - they are certainly not comprehensive and YMMV.

Is UPF food with ultra high fibre bad?

I don’t know.

My thoughts are that your total daily intake is more important than considering any single food item. As such, having some UPF in your diet is ok. The problem becomes epidemiologically measurable when, like the UK and US, 60% of calories consumed by some demographics are from UPF food.

And there are almost certainly multiple different things ‘wrong’ with UPF and so if you fix one problem, you may still be at risk from another. For example in your question, there are a lot of studies showing the importance of fibre in the diet, including those that add bran to whatever the person normally eats. So UPF with lots of fibre, all things equal, is likely less bad than UPF without.

Is UPF with ultra high vitamin A bad?

Fat soluble vitamins (A, D, E and K) are interesting in that they don’t show benefits above RDA, and in high doses cause a long list of nasty symptoms. In particular, vitamin A in excess is correlated with increased risk of multiple major diseases and even death.

Scientists only use terms like ultra processed food after defining them in their scientific papers. The problem here is that the media find it difficult to write a short article for the general audience if they have to define things scientifically.

What specifically is bad about UPF foods is still being researched. A few leading ideas are:

• Very little fibre
• Starches are all immediately accessible to digestion and so blood glucose spikes much more than for the non-UPF equivalent
• UPF foods are soft and dry (so weigh less) making it very easy to eat a lot very fast, so you eat too many calories.
• Relatively high in salt and sugar
• Use of emulsifiers. These may change your gut microbiota and also make your gut more leaky causing inflammation
• Use of preservatives and artificial colours
• Frequently have a lot of oil

Low fibre, emulsifiers and preservatives, while lacking variety of phytochemicals found in fresh food is known to change your gut health. People on UPF diets tend to eat more and have higher blood glucose spikes leading to heart disease and diabetes.

Altogether this is a recipe for a shorter, less healthy life

This is the correct answer.

Another way to distinguish the good from the bad: Good bread goes stale in a few days, it also is harder to chew. UPF bread will sit in your breadbin for 7 days without noticeable changes and is fluffy and relatively light.

The reason for the fluffiness and the shelf life is all the chemical additives.

You can see why the corporations love UPF bread - and why (if you didn’t know the health impact) you might want to buy UPF bread on your weekly shop.

What are you talking about, the victims weren’t white?

/s

Almost every survey will get 6-10% of people answering yes to the most extreme or batshit crazy option, no matter what.

Probably the main reason is that people are pissed off that they are being approached by survey takers and punish the survey for revenge.

And there are some batshit crazy people out there.

It seems you misunderstand the goal of goverment.

This is your opinion of what you want governments to be, not what they actually are.

What is the point of not researching and having bigger budget, if it can’t buy thing that did not get created?

What a lot of negatives and hypotheticals. All solved by getting a return on investment and having that money to do more things with, including research.

And then on goverment level there is no such thing as copyright or patent.

I’d like to introduce you to the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) which is an intergovernmental organisation that does precisely what you say doesn’t exist.

They STILL need to put in money to create their own product.

Sure, but the cost to duplicate the product is tiny compared to researching, developing then creating a production run for it. And this fake normally severely impacts the profits for the inventor.

But now we’re just repeating the same arguments.

You appear to want to completely burn down a system you don’t understand because of some examples of misuse. For example, as there are slumlords, should we make all property free? Or should we solve the underlying problem (of massive capital flows to the rich?)

You also have no idea how to read and understand a patent. The way they are written is horrendously verbose and highly confusing, but so are medical research papers or legal case summaries, and for the similar reasons: these are highly technical documents that have to follow common law (i.e. a long history of legal decisions taken in IP disputes).

The real problem in the US IMHO has been the constant defunding of the patent office that has allowed a large number of very poor patents to be filed. The problems you are screaming about largely go to that root cause.

But don’t throw the baby out with the bath water - you have no idea how bad that would be for everybody but the mega corporations.

Manufacturing lines are built all that time for unpatented products,

And cheaply, because the research and productisation has been done by somebody else - this is an argument for patents

plus a competitor can’t just “take all of that work and investment”, they will need to put in money to create their own product,

Not true. One major issue is that many competitors literally copy the product exactly. Fake products wreck the original company

even if it’s a copy they still need to make it work,

That is 100x easier when you have a working product to clone

They’ll be second to market, and presumably need to undercut price to get market share… This is a very risky endeavour, unless the profit margins are huge, and in which case, good thing that there’s no patents…

The point is exactly that the fake product undercuts the original by a huge amount (they had no investment to pay off).

If the research is so costly and complex (pharmaceutical, aeronautical,…), then it should be at least partly funded by the government, through partnerships between universities and companies.

I agree that the government model makes sense for a lot of areas and products. But note that a government won’t invest millions or billions in developing a product if another country immediately fakes the product and prevents the government from collecting back the taxes it spent on the research.

As I discuss above there are lots of criticisms to the current IP laws - adjustment is 1000x better than abolishing a system that has driven research and development for several hundred years

All evidence points to the opposite of your conclusion.

In places where IP laws are weak or non-existent, very little fundamental or expensive research is done by companies - because the result is immediately cloned by 100 competitors. In medicine, companies will not research and develop new drugs to market unless they can get a return on the investment. Even in places with strong IP laws, development of drugs that can’t produce a return in the limited monopoly window is simply not done (eg with a small number of patients or when 1 course of a drug will permanently cure the patient), so many diseases do not have treatments.

In countries where there is strong IP laws, innovation jumps because innovating creates new things that people/companies can sell for profit. A personal area of interest is development of small-arms - every single advance from muskets to modern weapons is documented in patents in the US and Europe; the rate of innovation in the 19th and 20th centuries was incredible - and that is via patents and profit in the free market.

Now, we can have a productive argument about state sponsored research - but unless the state undertakes all research in an economy (which would be staggering overreach), we need IP laws.

We can also discuss patents on software (which IMHO are not needed because companies do fundamental research without patent laws like in the UK).

We can also discuss what is the appropriate time that copyright should remain - the Disney law in the US is a ridiculous overreach. It was 25 years or until the death of the author/artist - that worked very well for centuries.

You don’t need government promises of monopoly rights to create innovation in the marketplace, competition drives innovation.

Here’s one that I enjoyed and covers a critical period of modern East Asian history: “The Gate” by François Bizot.

It’s him recounting how he travelled to Cambodia and was captured by the Khmer Rouge. He survived … just … By forming a relationship with Comrade Duch who

as the Chairman of Tuol Sleng (S-21) prison camp, and head of the Santebal, Kang Kek Iew was responsible for the interrogation and torture of thousands of individuals, and was convicted for the execution of at least 12,272 individuals, including women and children [Wikipedia]

While he covers the history of the Khmer Rouge period, his writing is highly empathic and discusses the suffering of himself and hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens at the hands of other ordinary citizens and how could this possibly happen. It’s a highly emotional book.

Best of luck with your reading!

No toilet rules me - my alone time is ungovernable!

But the last thing I need is a spring loaded giant fish, especially in my toilet.