How else can one explain the persistent “blindness” and “deafness” of the President of the United States to the actions of the President of Russia?

George Simion, winner of the first round of Romania's presidential election on May 5, 2025, explained why he is against military aid to Ukraine in its confrontation with Russian occupiers: "We said we would promote peace, and we see the only solution in de-escalating this conflict. Arms aid is disadvantageous to Germany, France, Romania, Poland. We have suffered a lot from this war and we need peace," he said.

“Did You do that?” - asked the German officer, pointing to “Guernica.” “No,” Picasso replied, “you did that!”

In his essay, journalist Oleh Cheslavskyi demonstrates how critical thinking can manifest itself through a vivid historical analogy.

The destruction of the world order that is taking place today is based on the substitution of concepts: “value” is giving way to “cost”. However, civilized society still has a chance.

In order to save human civilization, we need to cure cancer before dealing with minor ailments. 

In systems theory there is a concept of “catastrophe”, which means an abrupt qualitative change in an object with a smooth quantitative change in the parameters on which it depends.

In his quarter century in power, Vladimir Putin has ensured that Russia has become a country of lonely and disconnected people.

Modern man lives in a world of convenient things. For example, right now I am typing this text on a laptop keyboard, next to me there is an electric lamp, a smartphone, a computer mouse on a mat, a fan, a chocolate bar in a convenient package and much more. All of these technical devices (lamp, keyboard, laptop, smartphone, fan...) and materials (mouse pad and even the convenient packaging for the chocolate bar) were invented by someone. 

These books, published at the end of the nineteenth century, explained the mechanisms that allowed the tyrants of the past to seize power and became the “textbook” for the dictators of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They show how ordinary people can easily be used to create a mindless mob ready to kill other people for no rational reason.

There is a famous optical illusion: you have to determine which way a ballerina rotates if you look only at her shadow. Some people will say that the ballerina rotates clockwise, others that it rotates counterclockwise. But a real ballerina rotates in a certain direction! Which way? How do we find out who's right?

The essay by Yuriy Khristensen (analyst of the media center of the Odessa Political Platform) is not only a sample of brilliant publicism, but also a living example of critical thinking. Its author is from Ukraine, so the words “our”, “we” refer to Ukrainians. The source of the text is Echo, the original is the Facebook page of Yuriy Khristensen.

More than 100 years ago, the British Lord Arthur Ponsonby, while researching the First World War, wrote the book “Falsehood in War-Time” [1]. Already in our time, Belgian Anna Morelli actualized this work and identified 10 main principles of military propaganda [2].

Moscow writer and journalist Alexey Polikovsky wrote this article 10 years ago. But the topic raised in it is a key one today, as it allows us to understand the causes of global events taking place in the world and to predict their possible consequences. Therefore, we plan to develop the theme of this article in our subsequent publications and invite readers in advance to discuss them widely. For now, we offer you the full text of Alexey Polikovsky's article (source - Svoboda Slova).

It is difficult, but it is there, and there is no doubt about it. It was hidden by lies and disinformation... Hidden by those who “did it” in reality.

As an epigraph: "Russian troops grouping "Center" blocked Ukrainian Lisichansk" (reports in Russian media on June 24, 2022) 

It is vital... Even in science, where you need complete freedom of imagination, doubt is necessary. And in everyday life, there's no need to talk about it.

This article is the final part of a detailed report (the full report in PDF format is available here) prepared by Trust but Verify as part of a fact-checking investigation into the missile attack on the Okhmatdyt children's hospital in Kyiv on July 8, 2024. The first part assessed the parameters of the missile that attacked Ohmatdyt and found that all these estimates fully correspond to the characteristics of the X-101 missile. The second part shows that all the arguments against the fact that it was an X-101 missile are based on false premises. The third part analyzes alternative versions expressed by officials and discussed in social media.

This article is the second part of a detailed report (the full report in PDF format is available here) prepared by Trust but Verify as part of a fact-checking investigation into the missile attack on the Okhmatdyt children's hospital in Kyiv on July 8, 2024. The first part of the report assessed the parameters of the missile that attacked Ohmatdyt and found that all these estimates fully correspond to the characteristics of the X-101 missile. The second part analyzes the arguments against the fact that it was an X-101 missile.

This article is the first part of a detailed report (the full report in PDF format is available here) on our fact-checking investigation of the missile attack on the Okhmatdyt children's hospital in Kyiv on July 8, 2024. This part provides the rationale for estimates of the parameters of the missile that hit Ohmatdyt and compares them with the characteristics of the X-101 missile.

Cover - Good and Evil in everyone (image source - JoyReactor).
Today our world is engulfed in armed conflicts that threaten the future of human civilization.

In The Escape from Freedom (1941), Fromm explores the reasons that make man "give up his freedom to dictators, turning himself into a small cog in the machine: not a free man, but a well-fed and well-dressed automaton."

This article by Denis Dragunsky was published on February 25, 2022, i.e. the day after his state launched a full-scale armed invasion of a neighboring sovereign country.

In the photo from the Forensic Legal Newspaper, the owners turned bullet holes in the fence into flowers.

"1984" ("Nineteen Eighty-Four") is a famous anti-utopian novel by George Orwell, published in 1949. This novel is both a warning and a prophecy. It describes a certain totalitarian state "Oceania" with all the attributes of dictatorial regimes: mass surveillance, brainwashing, denial of freedom and individual autonomy. 

We present to your attention the abstracts of an article by Nikita Nepryakhin on Forbes, dedicated to critical thinking - a key skill for distinguishing truth from lies.

On the cover on the left: Warsaw in 1939, on the right Mariupol in 2022. Two cities completely destroyed by war. This is the price for the unlearned lessons of history - people's lives and the fate of humanity. Fragments from Erich Fromm's book "Anatomy of Human Destructiveness" describe the events of the Second World War, but if you replace in them the names of political figures and the names of countries, they reflect the events of our days surprisingly accurately.

This book is about breaking free from programmed behavior, "how to unleash our full stature — our total brain power".