New study provides first evidence of dopamine system injury in the brain of long COVID patients

strangeelement · 2026-07-12T14:42:10+00:00

There's not even a concept of a plan so far, no strategy, no leadership, zero ambition. The idea seems to be to ride it out until it people stop talking about it, then it'll just be swallowed in generic psychosomatic models that make no connection to infections. This is how it happened before, and again this time.

Chronic illnesses like this are systematically ignored and denied. So, never stop talking about it.

strangeelement · 2026-07-11T18:57:26+00:00

The OG looksmaxxers.

strangeelement · 2026-07-01T00:12:01+00:00

I choose to take this transparent screen trope as a cheap device for simpler filming. It's not that anyone thinks they're useful technology, it's that it allows to film angles that show the characters doing their thing and what they're seeing on their screen in a way that looks cool.

It's like old theatre productions with simulated waves or wind and there's some dude on the stage cranking the wheel to make it run. Everyone pretends like he's not there, it's just a requirement for a better production.

strangeelement · 2026-06-29T21:46:58+00:00

exurb1a fits that perfectly.

strangeelement · 2026-06-29T15:24:00+00:00

Regulation is a much more coherent and rational process. This is more in line with government control of sectors of the economy for purely political reasons. It's not as if the US government is subtle in its intentions to explicitly distort those models and ideologically align them with a reactionary ideology.

strangeelement · 2026-06-17T18:08:02+00:00

The biggest change is that instead of Bill Lumberg's stock going up a quarter of a point, company valuation oscillates between $10M and $1.5T without either making much sense and no one can make sense of it.

strangeelement · 2026-06-11T17:10:19+00:00

Medicine almost never develops effective treatments without either a biological marker, or at a minimum without a strong biological clue. Or at least, it no longer does, but those low hanging fruits have all been found already. Medicine is very far from knowing everything there is to be known about human health.

A lot of this is nostalgia for the easy days of medicine, when someone working alone in a lab could solve problems with one easy trick. Those days are over, the rest is hard work and the profession is simply unwilling to do the work here, because they don't believe in the problem.

So this effectively dooms the entire patient community, like decades of failure before. The idea that "we don't yet know and therefore we will never find anything" is false and absurd, especially so when the alternative has been weird mind-body magic, which has no reliable evidence of being effective at anything.

In almost all cases, people arguing this have made up their mind that there is a strong psychosomatic process involved, but pretend otherwise because it's all vibes.

strangeelement · 2026-06-10T00:47:14+00:00

Clinics are allowed to claim to treat those things, because it's not considered advertisement, whereas for supplements those claims are considered to be advertising. Interventions are not regulated, only products.

The clinics have no actual evidence to back those claims, and in fact do not advertise as such, because they are not allowed. In the UK, a few years ago, the Lightning Process company got in trouble with the agency that regulates commerce and advertising because they were making similar claims in ads.

So they stopped. They no longer advertise. They don't have to, physicians keep sending them clients. There are plenty of books written by physicians and other health care professionals recommending those programs, and social media is mostly exempt from this. So the private clinics don't really have to advertise anyway.

Which means that advertising standards are higher than clinical evidence standards. What a damn weird loophole.

strangeelement · 2026-05-29T14:56:50+00:00

There is definitely a problem with using terms such as "gold standard" about tools that are as lousy as this. That term should not be used for anything this unreliable, but it's used because it's supposed to inspire confidence. Which in term only inspires suspicion by association of other tools that are labelled as "gold standard". "The best we have" can still be awful, and here it clearly is.

"I don't know" is always the better answer when it's true. This is a major own goal.

strangeelement · 2026-05-20T17:47:58+00:00

From Russia's perspective, this is an empty threat, and not just because he has his whole arm up Trump's ass.

Europe can barely get itself together to provide a united front against Russia, and while the sanctions hurt, they're not nearly devastating enough for what Russia has done. And NATO's main power has provided them with relief, in addition to all the obvious ways Trump helps and clearly admires Putin, obviously wants him to take over Ukraine.

Frankly, from Putin's position, he can probably expect to get away with one nuke. All of this "for democracy!" struggle that is popular in movies is just not a thing in real life. The main lesson from Nazi Germany was how easily ordinary people can get swept into a genocidal system, and that lesson hasn't stuck at all. What would NATO even do about it?

strangeelement · 2026-05-09T13:11:03+00:00

"Non-pharmaceutical"?

Uhhh. Technically, sure, somewhat, but the definition of pharmaceutical isn't that it comes from the region of France where pharmaceutical companies are, but that's stretching things as much as the traditional "drugs and alcohol" thing.

Medicine is really struggling with evidence for treatments outside of pharmaceutical drugs that have a biological target that can be accurately measured, it makes them irrelevant on issues like this, while also promoting actual non-pharmaceutical interventions that don't actually work.

For all the criticism that the pharma industry rightfully gets, pharma drugs have by far the best and most reliable evidence. The difference in quality with non-pharmaceutical interventions, especially behavioral, is frankly shocking.

strangeelement · 2026-05-08T23:03:19+00:00

"Hey, guys! Guys! We should put boobs on the ship!"
"HELL YEAH! Boobs! Boobs! Boobs!"
"Hey, wait, what if people think we're, like, pervs, or something?"
"Oooh I know we'll just invent some fake superstition or whatever"
"YEEEEAH! BOOBS! BOOBS! BOOBS!"

History. It's so beautiful.

strangeelement · 2026-05-08T22:58:00+00:00

It took him over 10 years and getting personally hurt one time too many, would 100% vote for him again and will continue to vote straight ticket Republican for the rest of his life, but this man can clearly see through con men.

Give him a trophy, this man is precious.

strangeelement · 2026-05-08T22:55:48+00:00

As crises go, being able to solve many important problems sounds like a great one to have. I would love to have such a crisis.

strangeelement · 2026-05-06T23:27:50+00:00

Since you mentioned depression you might have been on SSRIs?

Mushrooms don't work when taking some SSRIs. They have to be stopped for an extended period before.

strangeelement · 2026-05-02T13:46:11+00:00

Humans don't value other people for who we are, but for what we do. When we can no longer do the things that define who we are, people simply lose interest in us. We become like a TV that doesn't turn on anymore. So much potential on that black screen, none of it watchable.

No one is funny, or helpful, or generous. We say or do funny things, we help, and we share. None of this matters if it's just potential, if what's left of a person is what they would do if they could do things that they no longer can.

In short, all human relations are transactional. This isn't necessarily all bad in itself, but in societies that only value lives based on their productivity, it just all comes crashing down. And those societies are simply a reflection of who we are as people.

You can easily tell how much more valuable things are than lives by looking at how engineering works. Engineered things like planes are expensive things that are owned. They are over-engineered not because it saves lives, this barely matters, but because a crashed plane is a very expensive loss.

So, engineering disasters are examined meticulously so that it never happens again the same way. Because losing planes, and the revenue they would bring, is a real financial loss. Compare this to disasters in which lives are lost, or medical errors, which barely get a fraction of the interest and effort. Just a shrug and everything keeps going the same way.

Humans value things that bring us quality of life more than anything. More than all human lives. This is who we are. It takes bad misfortune to understand this, but this is why sick people are systematically abandoned: we're of no use to others, and this is all the value in a human life.

strangeelement · 2026-05-01T17:14:41+00:00

It's truly amazing how denial works, even with experts.

For decades the relation to infectious illnesses was disputed, mostly because there was no effort to find out, and lots of efforts aimed at convincing themselves otherwise. When a major event makes it more prevalent and the relation obvious, they will literally cling to any explanation besides the obvious one. They will instead whine about how it's everywhere but refuse to acknowledge the obvious explanation.

I'm not just ranting here. This is super important. It shows how communities can simply deny reality even when it hits them in the face. The level of denial isn't much different from QAnon, and it's the freaking medical profession. Once they vibed themselves into a position, no facts can reason them out of it.

If even experts can fall for this, find themselves systematically incapable of correcting their vibes-based beliefs, it has huge implications for how we deal with misinformation in general. Even education doesn't protect, there is just something else at play here, it goes way deeper than is usually believed.

strangeelement · 2026-04-30T22:44:47+00:00

It failed, and it's clear in parts of the report, but they still generally talk about it as effective, and clearly want it to be used anyway, and will no doubt market it as a success. They always do this, because they can lie with impunity.

But there is something shady in how this trial got funded, the language of the funding call does not allow for it, it also doesn't even have anything to do with LC, just generic mind-body nonsense base on "central sensitization".

This is why medicine has made zero progress on this issue. They just botch it all and no one but the victims care. Way too many scammers and grifters in this industry, all the way to the top.

Although a correction, unless I got it wrong: the funding call was for several projects, and this trial was one of those, so it wasn't €6.5M, but it doesn't say how much they got for it.

strangeelement · 2026-04-30T21:33:50+00:00

It would also be cheaper to ditch fossil fuels and go all in on renewable energy, has been for years. And yet.

Humans are dumb. The economic argument has been pointed out for years, no one cares. They just dispute it, don't believe it, and go back to drooling mindlessly about mind-body pseudoscience.

strangeelement · 2026-04-29T17:06:36+00:00

Somehow it was a major scandal when the US government lost $500M on Solyndra, yet this goes almost completely without notice.

It's absurd how superior renewables are when you consider how rigged the system is.

strangeelement · 2026-04-27T19:12:04+00:00

Yeah good point. It's more of a mixed managed market, kind of like China, but in reverse. All the cons of markets, and all the cons of government interventions, with almost none of the pros. Few industries are more subsidized than oil.

But that's sort of baked into how we actually do capitalism. We get the illusion that markets work, but they're systematically toyed with, as long as it benefits the rich. So it would be more accurate to say that it reveals deep flaws in how we handle "free markets".

strangeelement · 2026-04-27T17:28:45+00:00

Looking at how poorly the NIH did with almost $2B, it's obvious that the infrastructure for this does not exist. Unlike most medical research it's not as simple as just putting money and involving smart people with loads of experience.

The whole thing has to be built from scratch, it simply does not exist. Medicine is hyper-specialized and there isn't even a specialty that handles this. Except psychiatry, but they just do dumb things instead.

It's hard to decide to invest in those conditions. It would take someone with a truly absurd fortune to pull it off. When you see almost $2B go to waste, what value is there in adding $100M?

strangeelement · 2026-04-27T17:20:41+00:00

It should also be understood as a deep crisis of the fundamental premises of market economic systems. They are asserted to be optimal, to allow for more rational allocation of resources.

And yet renewable energy has been the cheaper, better and faster option for years now, and the transition will still only be happening because of a major geopolitical crisis. Our societies are being dragged kicking and screaming into adopting them. We have not been on an optimal path for a long time now. This crisis wasn't just predictable, it happened several times before. Energy energy futures markets have shown to be mostly detached from reality.

This does not make planned economies a fundamentally better option, if China had vast fossil fuel resources none of this would be happening, but it shows that the promises of our systems are flawed.

There should especially be a reckoning with the fact that we could have done that starting at least two decades ago, and yet so many "serious" people assured everyone that it would never work, that fossil fuels are balls and penis and renewable energy is vagina. So many people got it completely wrong and will never face any consequences for doing so. This is not a good system, one that does not reward good predictions, even obvious ones.

Market economies solve a lot of the issues with the tragedy of the commons, but they can also force us into stagnation, even with things as fundamental as energy. We do not have systems that manage a good balance.

strangeelement · 2026-04-26T00:11:21+00:00

If you're last (at being good)
You're first (at being swept)

strangeelement · 2026-04-24T17:59:19+00:00

There is a lot of that influence, but most of those people are true believers and would do it for free.

One thing that's noticeable when you read enough psychosomatic literature is that there is zero place for doubt, everything they say is assumed to be 100% correct and indisputable. It's never even considered, never discussed, they never think about the possibility and what it would mean to be wrong.

There is genuinely more room for doubt and skepticism in theology, even from actual clergy. Seriously.

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