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"While the shooter, 20-year-old Douglas Sapirman, fired 24 rounds from an AR-15-style rifle, Dicken did not hesitate to use the Glock handgun he was legally carrying. Sapirman was "neutralized" within two minutes, police said." Hero Within that CNN story in the link, is a story of a shooting in Colorado in which police arrived, mistook the private rescuer for shooter and fatally shot him. A thing like that happened in the small country town where my Mom lived her whole life, in southern Oklahoma near the Red River. There had been an armed robbery of the bank going on, a local man wrestled the gun away from the robber and was holding it on the robber when the police arrived from a neighboring, larger town. The police shot the good guy, but fortunately, in this case, it was only a wounded arm, and he lived.

My "conspiracy theory" is that people wrote books hundreds or in some cases thousands of years ago, and then died of old age, but many people today are still following those books, and their actions come out to be coordinated even if they do not communicate with each other at all, because they are following the same books. That may not be true for much longer. The environmentalists are now banning nitrogen fertilizer in places. If this becomes widespread, billions of people will starve, and I think the environmentalists would welcome that as "less of a load on the Earth." (Of course Peikoff quoted one of them as saying "we can only hope that the right virus comes along," and along comes COVID-19...) The selfishness of self-defense is a virtue. (I use "selfishness" here in the Ayn Rand sense, which could be described with redundancy as "selfishness without victims.") There is something in Atlas Shrugged (probably from Ragnar Danneskjold) about the killed attacker achieving the only destruction he has any right to achieve -- his own. And I suppose it's okay to regard it as a sad thing if someone commits suicide, perhaps more so if they do it at your hands, as it were... Technically the Left is correct that they are "more Christian than the Christians," in the sense that they are more consistent about self-sacrifice than the Republicans. The Republicans support both freedom and Christianity, even though consistency would make it an either-or choice. A lot of Republicans are too anti-conceptual to see the contradictions, and they don't want to see them. (They sometimes argue that such inconsistencies prove that reason is inadequate by itself and that religion is necessary, but this argument is circular, because it is religion that creates the inconsistencies in the first place.) In the past I have interacted with atheist groups, but was disappointed that they wanted to be "Good without God" which suggests that if you take God out of the Bible you can get something good. Thomas Jefferson also tried that, writing his own Bible with the miracles edited out, or so I've read. But if you secularize Christianity and make it more consistent, you get Communism, as Ayn Rand observed. Thomas Paine ended up a Communist, if I remember correctly... (I don't recall the chronology around this.) Ayn Rand was right to call selfishness (as she defined it) a virtue. American intellectuals have been unwilling to embrace what she said (or even read it I think), but what is left of the originally American sense of life seems to understand it perfectly (without reading Rand or knowing that she provides a logical basis for it). It is this sense of life that the Left seeks to destroy, and they are trying to use Christianity as a tool with which to do it. I hope this is not successful; I would hope it undermines support for Christianity instead, but far too many people would rather give up consistency.

OMG, are you making fun of me? I asked you what did Stoltenberg exactly say. And you give me an article from... Russia Today (an a priory dubious publication, as it is by a governmental agency of one of the parties in conflict) with, supposedly, a quote from him, but also with a lot of many other irrelevant claims - I didn't even read. As if RT the only place it can be found! Couldn't you give me just the quote? Or you believe that if you refer me to RT, I would be more convinced of its authenticity?😁😁 I don't dispute the quote you gave: it happens😁 to be correct. Here it is, for reference: It is taken from where you should have quoted it, from the NATO site (see here). Instead, you took it from RT, together with the lying title "NATO's chief lets the cat out of the bag: US-led bloc has ‘been preparing since 2014’ for proxy conflict with Russia" plus other comments... Now, you implied that NATO had a plan to perpetrate provocations to induce Putin to invade. Two questions: a). How did you infer, from that quote, that NATO had a plan etc.? (b). Otherwise, on what other basis do you arrive at that conclusion?

Yes, when it was about me justifying my own claims, I did. I even accepted to reverse the onus of proof and I examined (and refuted) your claim (it was something about Minsk, see below). No. It doesn’t work that way. I made no claims regarding facts (except the two mentioned below, which I proved). I mainly disputed your „facts”. It is up to you, but not simply to source (one can find sources for anything), but to prove. AlexL: You ignored my points. Again. Yes, you did it, again! My main point was that during a war it is useless and stupid to expect objective information from sources of the warring sides. This is because one expects them to disseminate propaganda. And I noted that you (seem to) rely systematically on Russian sources belonging to government or related to it. Now about the Minsk agreements. I would like to take them off the table once and for all. We had in fact two distinct Minsk-related subjects. One was about Putin having signed it (or one of them). The second was about Putin having mentioned the Ukrainian non-compliance as one of the reasons of the February 24, 2022 attack. 1. Did Putin sign one of the agreements? Your initial claim was exactly this: “Minsk deal ... which Putin co-signed, btw”. I commented: “(BTW, Putin did NOT co-sign either of the two Minsk agreements; it took me less than 5 minutes to check...)” You did not acknowledge your error. It was a secondary point, but now you claim „You already made one wrongful accusation, which I verified from Wiki concerning Putin's presence at Minsk”, as if the dispute was about Putin's presence at Minsk (see here). 2. Did Putin invoke the Ukrainian non-compliance as one of the reasons of the February attack? You correctly assumed that the Minsk Agreements were important for Putin. From this you - wrongly - assumed that he signed them himself – see #1. To stress their importance for Putin, you claim that he was “using Minsk's failure as (one) justification to invade.” You even brought some references to support this, but the proved only that maybe in his head the Minsk non-compliance may have been one of his reasons of the February attack. Then I did what I was not legitimately expected to do: I DIS-proved your claim (see here). Putin listed the reasons for his „Special Operation” in his speech broadcasted the early morning of the February 24 invasion. I found the very official transcript of his speech on the very official Kremlin site, both in Russian and in English. The words “Minsk”, “accords” or “agreement” are absent... You never addressed this point from that comment of mine, or any other point… This seems to be a pattern of behavior, a telling one… PS: Besides, about Minsk agreements you made a lot of inexact claims. One of them: “Yelensky… the Minsk treaties he signed” (see here). This is not the moment to mention more of them, but in this Ukraine thread they abound… But you write: “I can't be bothered to validate every trivial detail.” Yeah, detail, right! A flood of unverified “details”… from RT, or RIA Novosti, or from memory failures. If you disagree, just tell me, and I will bring some more examples. But I guess you won’t… But I might do it regardless 😉 And please address all my points.