Ukrainian couples training together for war

Instead of planning their weddings or enjoying their marital life, these young people are preparing to fight. Source: Natalie Thomas / Reuters, reporting from Odessa on March 19.

Ukrainian defenders bid their wives and children farewell

 The photos are from the railway station in Kyiv. Men who will fight for their country say goodbye to their wives and children who evacuate by trains. Source: a March 4 report by Dylan Stableford.

 

US psychiatrists gone crazy, call grief a disorder

There is a joke that after enough years of practicing psychiatry, the profession becomes a diagnosis. For the leading figures in US psychiatry, this certainly seems true. They have added "prolonged grief" to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder, defining it as inability to return to previous activities a year after a loss.

To me, the idea that an individual who has suffered a loss is expected ever to get over it completely, is crazy. Yet the addition to the Manual will open a wide door to medicate people whose only "pathology" is still mourning their deceased parent, sibling, spouse or child two or three years after his death. Overmedicating people in pain is dangerous. Not so long ago, other medical professionals, including those of the FDA itself, helpfully guided by pharmaceutical companies eager to sell their painkillers, created an opioid epidemic which has killed hundred of thousands of people and still continues.

Ukrainian warriors say goodbye to their beloved

 Photos from the railway station in Lviv on March 9 (source).

No True Russian

You may have heard about the "no true Scotsman" fallacy:

Person A: "No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge."
Person B: "But my uncle Angus is a Scotsman and he puts sugar on his porridge."
Person A: "But no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge." 

Now, it has a variety, "no true Russian": "Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov on Friday said that citizens who were speaking out against the war are not "real" Russians."

 

For what Russians are arrested

Arrests and other repressions against Russians protesting the war in Ukraine have reached absurdities that would have been comic if the entire situation was not tragic.

On March 12 in Moscow, a young man was arrested for displaying asterisks:

On March 13 in Nizhny Novgorod, a young woman was arrested for displaying a blank sheet:

Source (in Bulgarian).

Russia is trying to destroy Ukraine

 Putin's Russia has attacked freedom-loving Ukraine with full force, using rockets to ruin cities. Brave Ukrainians do wonders to defend their country. Brave Russians protest against the war and Putin and, as expected, get arrested and beaten. The West provides some help and imposes some sanctions but it seems too little too late. Why don't we stop trade with Russia altogether? The West is selling its soul for the damn Russian natural gas and the oligarch's dirty money.