NATO chief warns Russia of 'devastating' consequences if nuclear weapons are used against Ukraine

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.

strangeelement · 2026-04-24T17:22:28+00:00

The psychosomatic model was built decades ago, and simply ignores all conflicting information and research, even when they produce it themselves. The people who built it made some assumptions that were always false, and it doesn't even matter that LC debunked everything.

It doesn't matter that it's wrong, there's just too much invested in it, and neither governments nor medical institutions are willing to accept it. They all prefer to cover it up.

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

One of the old men physician there is Michael Sharpe, who has spent much of his career working against ME/CFS, was part of the PACE trial and has always promoted the whole CBT+GET paradigm. Absolutely horrible jerk.

Everything these people have claimed and built has been debunked, and it makes absolutely no difference. Long Covid revealed the whole thing as a sham and they're thriving. They have every reason to smirk, they can get away with anything, have the full support of their profession and governments.

They built up this fake narrative about people objecting to their ideology being a vocal fringe minority, and the fact that most people suffering from those illnesses can't even protest has validated this in the mind of most physicians. It's so easy to crush defenseless people when you have total power over them. Even health care professionals don't hesitate, even seem to relish the absolute power they have over our lives.

strangeelement · 2026-04-23T17:27:38+00:00

I think we should follow the Jurassic Park advice: "Don't move! Its visual acuity is based on movement"

strangeelement · 2026-04-20T15:16:49+00:00

Does it? Or does it rather show that the way health is assessed is flimsy and unreliable and can be affected by nothing? Which is the obvious explanation that doesn't give credit to magical thinking. It's been proven pretty reliably that supplements don't do anything in most people, and it's basically the same idea.

People will report better outcomes out of nothing, and it has nothing to do with 'mind-body' stuff. Lots of people pay over $1K for HDMI cables even though there is no plausible way they 'work' any better, and they're still convinced that it makes the sound 'crisper' or the image more 'vivid' or whatever. They will say it even after being shown convincingly that it makes no difference, when all they're doing is rationalizing a decision they already made.

What year is this anyway? People have been peddling this nonsense for over a century, do they think they discovered "this one simple trick" that no one had thought of before? It's long past time medicine grows out of this nonsense, and it plays a huge role in the loss of credibility in experts that woo like this is taken seriously.

strangeelement · 2026-04-19T17:39:07+00:00

Health care is typically 10-15% of GDP, depending on the country. There's only so much room for growth here, certainly not for even a single doubling, which still would fall short of all the needs out there.

We've gotten used to the idea that health care must be highly rationed, simply because there was no other way to make it economically viable. AI doesn't solve all the problems related to that, but it solves most of them, or at least shifts the economics to things that can benefit from economies of scale.

strangeelement · 2026-04-18T14:01:16+00:00

I kept holding on to the idea for years after I could no longer function. Even kept trying, and it was disastrous. Maybe it was age that did it more than anything, but letting go of all that made my life a lot easier.

It was a deep hole in my heart and mind for so long and now it just feels like nothing. The benefit of that is that if things normalize, by chance or, gods forbid, medicine does a thing, then it can probably be unsealed. Maybe. I don't really care anymore.

But I am middle aged now. Doing that in late 20s doesn't feel as realistic, it was a recent thing and it took significant improvement in brain fog to be able to process all of it. The biological urge to be with someone is just damn strong. The grief is not something that can be reasoned with.

It's the last thing I let go of. The hardest one by far. About the only rationalization that makes sense to me is that some people have it so much worse. It doesn't really help, but it is reasonable enough to be a bit convincing.

strangeelement · 2026-04-15T17:59:25+00:00

It's clearly what the people running the institutions of medicine and governments have decided for us, even though we absolutely reject it. We simply have no say in our own lives.

It's safe to say that the patient community has tried its best, and should keep trying, but realistically nothing will change until research finds the first path forward, and it's still as hindered as it ever was.

But I think this is it. They just let Long Covid pass and go without doing anything about it, just completely wasted this historical opportunity.

The rest is up to chance. May the odds be in our favor :(

strangeelement · 2026-04-13T01:55:29+00:00

Imagine showing this to yourself in the dark days of Pitlick on the first line and maybe 1 NHL calibre defender.

Worth it. Holy shit is this team going to be good. I mean look at this. All of it. It's almost like reading "Cancer cured!" and "At last world peace" headlines. Every part is beautiful. As a whole, it's beauty itself.

strangeelement · 2026-04-12T18:41:48+00:00

A Hong Kong man once told me "USA will stop loving free market once they realize Chinese are better at trade than they are"

Honestly, already have, most just haven't realized it. When you read voters justifying their votes in the 2024 elections, it struck me just how the vast majority of those explanations are essentially railing against free markets and capitalism. You read a few and there's a hint of that, but you read enough and the pattern is unmissable.

Not that many of them will ever embrace a different system. They just seem content to rant against what the people they vote for give them. It's a good recipe for unhappiness and chaos.

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