Economic Freedom

Recommended: An interesting and informative (if long) livestream podcast by a filmmaker/writer named Gonzalo Lira, who lives in Ukraine. He covers most of the relevant facts regarding the oligarch Kolomoiski (living in Switzerland) who helped place a comedian and actor, Zelensky, in power, as well as paying him to finance the Nazi Azov Battalion. According to Lira (in hiding as of the time he recorded this podcast) all of the cabinet ministers were "selected" by Kolomoiski and then duly "appointed" by Zelensky. The ministers are all thugs (according to Lira), as are the members of the Azov Battalion. The atrocities highlighted by the western media (the maternity hospital, for example) are mainly examples of classic "False Flag" operations, committed by the Ukrainian army (including, of course, Azov) against Ukrainian citizens, and then blamed on Putin and the Russian army. 
Retired Colonel Douglas MacGregor, Aaron Mate, Jimmy Dore, Gonzalo Lira, and other commentators whose links I've posted, are crystal clear on the reasons for the Russian incursion: Russia sees the expansion of NATO into Ukraine -- with the strong possibility of western (i.e., US) nukes stationed along its eastern border, just a few kilometers from Russia -- as an existential threat to its sovereignty, in exactly the same way and for the same reason, that the US under the JFK administration viewed Soviet nukes in Cuba -- just 90 miles away from the US -- as an existential threat to its own sovereignty. Lira posits hypothetically how the US would react if China, for example, formed military alliances with countries in South America, and then an otherwise neutral buffer-zone like Mexico were pressured to join such an alliance: would the US simply say, "Well, Mexico's a sovereign country so it therefore has the right to join any kind of alliance it pleases" or would it say, "such an alliance is ultimately controlled by China, and if Mexico ceases to be a neutral buffer between the US and the China/S.America alliance, we'll be seeing Chinese nukes on the northern border of Mexico, right next to Texas". I think the latter. And Lira, et al., are right when they aver that the US would view that as an existential threat to its own sovereignty and would probably take military action against Mexico...not to conquer territory but to keep Mexico "neutral", i.e., as a buffer between itself and the China/S.America alliance.
Same with Russia and Ukraine. Russia wants Ukraine neutral.
According to these sources, the outcome of this incursion is a foregone conclusion: the much larger, better equipped Russian army will win, especially since (as stated above) they view this issue as an "existential threat" and are willing to do whatever is necessary to keep Ukraine neutral AND to "de-Nazify" Ukraine by killing the Nazis...meaning killing the members of the Azov Battalion. The latter know this, of course, which (according to these sources) seems to be the main reason Zelensky/Kolomoiski/Azov are trying to keep the conflict going, as well as trying to coax other countries into the conflict -- especially the US -- in the hopes of starting a proxy war between the US and Russia, and in the hopes of extending the conflict long enough that they can continue surviving, probably by fleeing the country (just as Nazis in Germany did when they saw the war had turned against them).
It's important to counter the false narrative coming out of western mainstream media since the latter seem pretty much to be warmongers interested in getting the US involved in what would clearly be World War 3. To understand more on how and why US mainstream media all seems to be in lockstep with their narrative regarding Ukraine, look into the CIA's "Operation Mockingbird", as well as Obama's signing into law the right of the US government to promote propaganda to the public (he essentially reversed an earlier law that had forbidden the federal government from propagandizing to the public).
And THAT would be a perfect opportunity -- along with whatever new pandemics (or PLANdemics) the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates, et al., have in store for us -- to impose the "Great Reset" on everyone. You can kiss goodbye any liberties you're now enjoying if that happens. For an example of what that could look like, see what's going on in the megacity of Shanghai, China.
 

>I'm 32 and do not have AIDS
What does AIDS have to do with any of this? The risk factors for getting severe COVID are well known and have long been posted on the CDCs website: they are primarily obesity, diabetes, age, hypertension, pre-existing pulmonary condition (COPD, emphysema), any other immunosuppressive condition. AIDS is so rare compared to runaway obesity, type-2 diabetes, and hypertension that it wasn't taken into consideration at the time. However . . .
It's now well known by many doctors and researchers, that the mRNA genetic shots (Pfizer and Moderna) weaken immunity after about 90 days, especially after people get their boosters: the more boosters, the weaker the immunity becomes. According to a peer-reviewed Danish study from just a few months ago, by the end of 30 days, vax efficacy against Omicron falls below 50% (the threshold percentage according to the FDA for a vaccine to be called "effective"). By 3 months, the efficacy against COVID falls to zero; and (interestingly) after 3 months, the efficacy becomes negative. A negative efficacy means that the vaxed person is MORE likely to get sick from COVID than if he or she had simply remained unvaxed.
Even more interestingly, the more one is boosted, the more likely it becomes for that person to have a permanently weakened immunity -- even IF the immediate response to a booster might be a high-titer of antibodies. Antibodies, per se, are meaningless. All antibodies wane after a period time, but their reappearance is "memorized" by T-cells and Memory-B cells. If you damage, or "quench", the ability to mount a T-cell response or a Memory-B Cell response, you essentially cannot recreate antibodies against a pathogen. This "quenching" of deeper immune responses (T-Cells and Memory B-Cells) is known as "High-Zone Tolerance" and is a well known concept in immunology. According to many doctors and researchers today, they are seeing such cases in increasing numbers of patients, and they have given it a very interesting name: VAIDS, or "Vaccine Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome."
Note also:
According to Edward Dowd -- a former portfolio managing director at BlackRock -- many insurance companies are now publishing data from their actuarial tables showing an "unexplained" 40% increase in All-Cause-Mortality (meaning heart attacks, cancers, strokes, kidney failure, myocarditis, etc.) in the 18-64 age group, i.e., working-age adults starting in 2021. There's no indication on their death certs or healthcare reports that these people are dying from COVID. Could the lockdowns have contributed to these deaths? Probably. Lots of people postponed medical treatments and screenings at hospitals because of the lockdowns; but a 40% rise in a young demographic is equivalent to about a 10-sigma (10 standard deviations on a normal distribution) so the lockdowns, per se, can't explain it. Also, the same increase has been noticed in a young demographic -- military personnel -- who were on active duty, and not restrained in their homes. Many are concluding (justifiably) that at least part of this 10-sigma increase correlates almost exactly with the mass rollout of the experimental gene-therapy shots (as well as the adenovirus-vector shots of J&J and AstraZeneca). European insurance companies have noticed the same thing, by the way.
I have many links for those who are interested. Or you can do your own research by looking up online interviews with some of the following:
Robert Malone, MD (pioneer of mRNA tech in the 1980s);
Peter McCullough, MD (cardiologist);
Pierre Kory, MD;
Byram Bridle, MD;
Paul Alexander, MD;
Paul Marik, MD;
Michael Yeadon, PhD (former VP of Research at Pfizer);
Meryl Nass, MD;
Simone Gold, MD;
Joseph Mercola, MD;
Sherry Tenpenny, DO;
Zev Zelenko, MD;
Judy Mikovitz, PhD;
Ryan Cole, MD;
Roger Hodgkinson, MD;
Samuel Dube, MD;
Samantha Bailey, MD;
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., JD
Edward Dowd (formerly at BlackRock)
Steve Kirsch, PhD
Jessica Rose, PhD
Norman Fenton, PhD
Didier Raoult, MD
Kary Mullis, PhD (Nobel Prize winner, chemistry, 1993), inventor of the PCR process;
Luc Montagnier, PhD (Nobel Prize winner, medicine, 2008), discoverer of HIV.

Don't forget to read Klaus Schwab's revealing blueprint for your future, "The Great Reset", as well as the depopulation statements by Bill Gates during some of his TED Talks.
Read RFK, Jr.'s latest book, "The Real Anthony Fauci."
A sobering place to start for those who are naïfs might be this recent interview with Zev Zelenko, MD on the "Dr. Drew" YouTube channel. I'm actually surprised YouTube (owned by Google) didn't censor this and remove it entirely, the way it has done to so many other videos since March 2020. With any luck some of you might swallow the Red Pill and wake up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JBjO-0jTDs
 

>The reason is very simple: Putin is not a legitimate ruler and the Russian government is not morally legitimate.
Neither is Zelensky and neither is the present Ukrainian government. Zelensky was chosen by Igor Kolomoisky (a criminal oligarch living in Switzerland) because 1) he was a popular comic actor starring in a popular tv show so he had a high public profile; 2) he had no political or executive experience at all; and 3) he's a known cokehead. Upshot: Zelensky is very easily manipulated. Many Ukrainian civilians, especially those living abroad, have stated outright that the election was fixed and that Zelensky was essentially installed. "Deep State" players (including those in the U.S. such as the Biden crime family) like weak, easily manipulated leaders of foreign countries. It makes money laundering so much easier.
So the issues of "rights", "moral legitimacy", etc. are irrelevant in this conflict. The only issue that matters is to understand motives, not to agree with them. Russia views Ukraine as a necessary buffer between itself and NATO. Understandably, Putin does not want western nukes on his border, for the same reason the U.S. didn't want Russian nukes in Cuba, just 90 miles from its own border. Putin also doesn't want western-financed bioweapons facilities on its border (there were about 30 of them, last I heard), labs that the U.S.'s own Victoria Nuland admitted to in front of the Senate several weeks ago (much to the surprise, it seems, of senator Marco Rubio). If Zelensky were any kind of a leader at all -- legitimate or not -- he could negotiate peace immediately and save many Ukrainian lives. All he would have to do is agree to keep Ukraine neutral. He won't do it because he can't do it: he's just a popular-tv-actor-coke-addict-figurehead and is not the one actually in command of the government. The intent of those who are in command, is to keep the conflict going as long as possible to create a proxy-war between the west and Russia; i.e., specifically, between the U.S. and Russia. Lots of people in the west like that idea because lots of people can profit from war.
Objectivists should check their premises before apologizing for a regime run by absentee oligarchs, brutal thugs, and explicit Nazis.

>Be also aware that I am knowledgeable enough on the subject of Ukraine
Clearly not. Since you've apparently never even heard of the Azov Battalion -- or if you believe that they're a political party -- then you know nothing about Ukraine. If you've never heard of Kolomoisky, you know nothing about Ukraine. If you don't know who Victoria Nuland is (and don't know about her leaked phone call), then you know nothing about Ukraine. If you don't know about the Dept. of Defense documents indicating the financing of bioweapons labs in Ukraine, then you know nothing about Ukraine. I could go on but the conclusion is ineluctable: you know nothing about Ukraine except that it's next to Russia. You know that you don't like Russia mainly because Ayn Rand disliked Russia, so (like most on this board) disliking Russia is pretty much all you wish to know about Ukraine.
>And please don’t recommend me watching/reading someone else’s work to look myself for proof of YOUR claims! 
The proof of MY claims are based on the eye-witness accounts and testimony of others actually in Ukraine (Ukrainians, Russians, Americans, and sundry western European journalists) as well as leaked information such as phone calls, documents, etc. of principal actors responsible for a coup back in 2014 (Victoria Nuland, etc.). If you don't accept eye-witness accounts of Ukrainian citizens that the Ukrainian army has been shelling their own cities and committing atrocities against their own people, then you'll just have to travel to Ukraine yourself and see for yourself.
But then you'll be Red Pilled and awake and you probably won't like that. Please: swallow the Blue Pill, continue watching CNN, and go back to sleep.

>His particular example is not relevant to his point here... he could point to North Korea for example.
And yet he didn't point to an obvious example like North Korea. He pointed to Ukraine, indicating that he uncritically believes the narrative spun by mainstream media.
Look up "Operation Mockingbird".  And note this interesting declaration regarding intentionally planted misinformation (i.e., "disinformation") in the news cycle presented to the public by the established news venues (i.e., today they are The New York Times, Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, NPR, CNN, MSNBC, Fox):
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false"
William J. Casey
Director of the CIA, 1981-1987

*** Split from: Objectivists are working to save the world from tyranny--isn't that altruism? ***
>Just today I saw a news report that a gov't official in Russia had said that domestic opponents to Russia's current war in Ukraine will be sent to concentration camps.
What was the news source? Most of what mainstream media has presented to the public regarding Ukraine has been propaganda. Even many images have been shown to be hoaxes.

Ethnic Russians who speak Russian but live in Ukraine don't want to live under a Ukraine government run by a neo-Nazi gang (the Azov Battalion) with a puppet president (Zelensky). The Ukraine government has been shelling the ethnic Russian regions of Ukraine since 2014 and thousands of those Ukrainians have been killed. Additionally, as Undersecretary of State, Victoria Nuland, has confirmed in a recent videotaped Senate hearing, Ukraine has a number of bioweapons laboratories (she called them "research facilities") that we now know through documents released by the Pentagon, were and are, financed by the U.S. Apparently, Mr. Putin doesn't like the idea of U.S.-backed bio-weapons labs on his doorstep, especially given what is now know via leaked emails, etc., from Fauci, Daszak, Baric, et al., regarding gain-of-function research on viruses that began in North Carolina (Chapel Hill, University of N. Carolina, Fort Dietrich) and continued in Wuhan, China at their Institute of Virology. 

Can't understand why anyone would uncritically believe the narrative spun by mainstream media. 

I should also add -- for those who harp on the issue that "Putin is not the legitimate leader of the Russian Republic" -- that not only (as posted earlier) is Zelensky not the legitimate leader of Ukraine, but Joe Biden is not the legitimate leader of the U.S., so the lend-lease arrangement recently made between the U.S. and Ukraine has no "moral legitimacy" either.
You really believe a guy who stayed in his basement during most of the campaign phase, and made a few public appearances in which a dozen or so people showed up, each one sitting compliantly with a face mask, and separated by one another by six feet, sitting in a chair with a circle drawn around it -- that he got 80 million votes? The most popular POTUS in history? Even more popular than Obama? When Trump would speak at rallies in various cities, each filled with capacity crowds, e.g., when he spoke in Butler, PA, there are almost 60,000 people who showed up. And yet Biden won in a "secure, fair, and honest election"? I don't think so.
Watch "2000 Mules".

>it's only FOX News
That's a mistake. FOX (as well as its conservative competitor, Newsmax) is controlled opposition: it's permitted by its sponsors to criticize certain things, but not to criticize -- or even mention -- other things.
Examples: a year ago, Newt Gingrich was a guest being interviewed by commentator Harris Faulkner. When Newt started to mention the funding by George Soros of local Attorneys General who were radical lefties, Faulkner cut him off and told him that "we're not going to talk about Soros..." At first Newt laughed, thinking this was some sort of joke, but then he realized that FOX was simply censoring his statements: he was not permitted to mention the name "George Soros". More recently, Catherine Engelbrecht, a founding member of True-the-Vote (investigating the fraud of the 2020 presidential election) was on Tucker Carlson's show. She was told by Carlson before the show not to mention Dinesh D'Souza's recent documentary on the fraud, titled "2000 Mules", which used cell-phone tracking data to track thousands of ballot-harvesters ("mules") who went back and forth to ballot drop-boxes in many states, and then picked up more ballots (with names of dead people on them, or names of out-of-state people), to drop them into the ballot drop boxes. The documentary also tracks them going to various NGO headquarters where they picked up the ballots and were paid per ballot. FOX and Newsmax have stated publicly that they will not air the documentary or even mention it. 
As stated earlier, both FOX and Newsmax receive millions of dollars in sponsorship from Big Pharma (mainly Pfizer, it appears) and thus will not honestly criticize the so-called "vaccines."
In that sense, FOX and Newsmax are no different from CNN and MSNBC. The only way to watch these venues "objectively" is to start from the assumption that they are presenting propaganda promoting someone's interests that are most likely not your interests.
Wake up.

>which is objectively evil Russian aggression
As a response to objectively evil Ukrainian government aggression against other Ukrainians who are ethnically Russian. If you study some history of the subject instead of watching CNN and MSNBC you might learn something and arrive at a conclusion more consistent with the actual historical record.
This is known as the "correspondence theory truth," in which "truth = correspondence to fact"; as opposed to slavishly following MSM, which is known as the "coherence theory of truth," in which "truth = beliefs and statements that are not only internally consistent but concur, and are consistent with, stories and viewpoints espoused by pundits on MSM." As an example of the latter, when Brian Stelter on CNN went to one of the areas that were rioting after the George Floyd killing, and with a straight face told the cameras that "this is mainly a peaceful demonstration" when viewers could plainly see buildings burning in the background and people rioting violently in the streets, there were many viewers who, to this day, deny that there was any violent rioting in the streets because Brian Stelter -- Johnny-on-the-Spot -- told them what to think, and told them how to interpret what they were seeing. That's called "controlling the narrative."
It's like the scene in "The Wizard of Oz" where the little terrier Toto pulls back the curtain, revealing a harmless old man at a machine that amplifies his voice, making him sound menacing, and who then shouts (as a last-ditch attempt to "control the narrative" of Dorothy and her companions), "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!"
>war crimes, and atrocities
False flags. For example, the maternity hospital that was shelled several weeks ago, with reports of dead women and babies, and blamed on Russian forces by western mainstream media, had been evacuated several weeks earlier in February and was being used as a headquarters by Ukrainian military and the Azov battalion. That's why it was shelled by Russian forces. But women and babies were not among the casualties.
The online newscast called "The Hill: Rising" hosted by Kim Iversen had a webcast at the end of February about some of the fake images and newscasts coming out of Ukraine and promoted by mainstream media, such as spectacular nighttime rocket attacks that were actually images from a video game; images of "brave" president Zelensky donning military gear, apparently "ready to appear on the front lines to support his troops" that were actually recycled pictures from a year ago of a training exercise; etc. See link.
The more recent hysteria by MSM over Russian forces "about to attack a nuclear power plant" was a false flag, too. Ukrainian military took over the power plant and fired on Russian forces hoping to goad them into returning the fire (they didn't). Nevertheless, sleepwalkers in the west who swallow Blue Pills handed out to them by MSM got to shake their heads and virtual-signal to one another, "I just saw on The View that those nasty, nasty Russians were about to attack a nuclear power plant! That Putin guy sure is nuts!" Etc. Controlling the narrative.
>that are clearly reminiscent of those of the 3rd Reich
That's for sure! The members of the Azov Battalion are the scions of WWII-era Nazis (can't even call them "neo-Nazis; they're actual, old-style Nazis, and they even don some of the runic symbolism on their military gear). So when Putin declared that one of the aims of the incursion would be to "de-Nazify" Ukraine, he was being literal.
The Objectivists on this board are simply uninformed. It's understandable, though. Ayn Rand hated Russia, so followers of Ayn Rand should also hate Russia. That seems to be about the extent of "research" most Objectivists here have done on the topic of Ukraine.
As for Tucker Carlson: he's a good interviewer and very likable. Many haven't forgiven him, though, for the insulting way he treated attorney Sidney Powell after the fraud of the 2020 election started to become known (see Dinesh D'Souza's recent documentary on that, titled "2000 Mules" showing video evidence of massive ballot-stuffing by Democrats). The problem isn't Tucker; the problem is that Fox is really part of MSM now (it was been for a long time), whose function within that space is being seen by many (including me) as being "Controlled Opposition", i.e., a venue that is permitted to voice opposition to some of the prevailing narratives but only within certain limits. This applies to Newsmax, as well. Both Fox and Newsmax have taken large sums of money from Big Pharma so you won't hear a peep from them regarding the poisonous effects of the mass vaccination and mass boosting programs, and both news venues have demurred on the January 6th "insurrection" at the Capitol, and the 2020 election fraud.
Regarding the vaccines: as Edward Dowd (former managing director at BlackRock) has said, there's been a 40% increase since the vax rollout in 2021 of "All Cause Mortality" in a demographic that shouldn't be having such an increase: working age adults between 18 and 64. This was first reported a few months ago by the CEO of OneAmerica, a large insurance company headquartered in Indiana. A 40% increase in All Cause Mortality is about 10 Standard Deviations on a Normal Distribution, indicating an event that one wouldn't expect to see even in 200 years. Other insurance carriers, both US and European, have noticed similar kinds of increases over the past year. There are probably several causes (the lockdowns, for sure) but the injurious effects of the mRNA technology on causing long-term damage to the immune system, as well as contributing to blood clots and myocarditis, has now been admitted even by Pfizer during its recent FOIA releases of its trial data. Dowd and others (MDs and PhDs) are expecting huge numbers in excess mortality -- in the many millions, possibly more -- to die in the next few years. Unfortunately, many of those will be children.
Alternative viewpoints that aren't censored or controlled can only be had on alternative platforms such as Rumble, BitChute, Telegram, Gab, Gettr, Parler, Truth Social (Trump's platform), Frank Speech (Mike Lindell's platform), and maybe a few others. Under Elon Musk's helmsmanship, Twitter might rebound as an actual mainstream platform promoting free speech, hence, alternative narratives, but we'll have to wait to see how that all plays out in the next few months.

>and that one (Russia) was wrong for starting it,
Actually Ukraine started it back in 2014 when it started shelling the Donbas region populated by Ukrainians who are ethnically and linguistically Russian. The Ukrainian military has killed at least 14,000 civilians there, possibly more. So Russia is simply responding to long-time Ukrainian aggression against ethnic Russians.

I should also add -- for those who harp on the issue that "Putin is not the legitimate leader of the Russian Republic" -- that not only (as posted earlier) is Zelensky not the legitimate leader of Ukraine, but Joe Biden is not the legitimate leader of the U.S., so the lend-lease arrangement recently made between the U.S. and Ukraine has no "moral legitimacy" either.
You really believe a guy who stayed in his basement during most of the campaign phase, and made a few public appearances in which a dozen or so people showed up, each one sitting compliantly with a face mask, and separated by one another by six feet, sitting in a chair with a circle drawn around it -- that he got 80 million votes? The most popular POTUS in history? Even more popular than Obama? When Trump would speak at rallies in various cities, each filled with capacity crowds, e.g., when he spoke in Butler, PA, there are almost 60,000 people who showed up. And yet Biden won in a "secure, fair, and honest election"? I don't think so.
Watch "2000 Mules".

>it's only FOX News
That's a mistake. FOX (as well as its conservative competitor, Newsmax) is controlled opposition: it's permitted by its sponsors to criticize certain things, but not to criticize -- or even mention -- other things.
Examples: a year ago, Newt Gingrich was a guest being interviewed by commentator Harris Faulkner. When Newt started to mention the funding by George Soros of local Attorneys General who were radical lefties, Faulkner cut him off and told him that "we're not going to talk about Soros..." At first Newt laughed, thinking this was some sort of joke, but then he realized that FOX was simply censoring his statements: he was not permitted to mention the name "George Soros". More recently, Catherine Engelbrecht, a founding member of True-the-Vote (investigating the fraud of the 2020 presidential election) was on Tucker Carlson's show. She was told by Carlson before the show not to mention Dinesh D'Souza's recent documentary on the fraud, titled "2000 Mules", which used cell-phone tracking data to track thousands of ballot-harvesters ("mules") who went back and forth to ballot drop-boxes in many states, and then picked up more ballots (with names of dead people on them, or names of out-of-state people), to drop them into the ballot drop boxes. The documentary also tracks them going to various NGO headquarters where they picked up the ballots and were paid per ballot. FOX and Newsmax have stated publicly that they will not air the documentary or even mention it. 
As stated earlier, both FOX and Newsmax receive millions of dollars in sponsorship from Big Pharma (mainly Pfizer, it appears) and thus will not honestly criticize the so-called "vaccines."
In that sense, FOX and Newsmax are no different from CNN and MSNBC. The only way to watch these venues "objectively" is to start from the assumption that they are presenting propaganda promoting someone's interests that are most likely not your interests.
Wake up.

>which is objectively evil Russian aggression
As a response to objectively evil Ukrainian government aggression against other Ukrainians who are ethnically Russian. If you study some history of the subject instead of watching CNN and MSNBC you might learn something and arrive at a conclusion more consistent with the actual historical record.
This is known as the "correspondence theory truth," in which "truth = correspondence to fact"; as opposed to slavishly following MSM, which is known as the "coherence theory of truth," in which "truth = beliefs and statements that are not only internally consistent but concur, and are consistent with, stories and viewpoints espoused by pundits on MSM." As an example of the latter, when Brian Stelter on CNN went to one of the areas that were rioting after the George Floyd killing, and with a straight face told the cameras that "this is mainly a peaceful demonstration" when viewers could plainly see buildings burning in the background and people rioting violently in the streets, there were many viewers who, to this day, deny that there was any violent rioting in the streets because Brian Stelter -- Johnny-on-the-Spot -- told them what to think, and told them how to interpret what they were seeing. That's called "controlling the narrative."
It's like the scene in "The Wizard of Oz" where the little terrier Toto pulls back the curtain, revealing a harmless old man at a machine that amplifies his voice, making him sound menacing, and who then shouts (as a last-ditch attempt to "control the narrative" of Dorothy and her companions), "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!"
>war crimes, and atrocities
False flags. For example, the maternity hospital that was shelled several weeks ago, with reports of dead women and babies, and blamed on Russian forces by western mainstream media, had been evacuated several weeks earlier in February and was being used as a headquarters by Ukrainian military and the Azov battalion. That's why it was shelled by Russian forces. But women and babies were not among the casualties.
The online newscast called "The Hill: Rising" hosted by Kim Iversen had a webcast at the end of February about some of the fake images and newscasts coming out of Ukraine and promoted by mainstream media, such as spectacular nighttime rocket attacks that were actually images from a video game; images of "brave" president Zelensky donning military gear, apparently "ready to appear on the front lines to support his troops" that were actually recycled pictures from a year ago of a training exercise; etc. See link.
The more recent hysteria by MSM over Russian forces "about to attack a nuclear power plant" was a false flag, too. Ukrainian military took over the power plant and fired on Russian forces hoping to goad them into returning the fire (they didn't). Nevertheless, sleepwalkers in the west who swallow Blue Pills handed out to them by MSM got to shake their heads and virtual-signal to one another, "I just saw on The View that those nasty, nasty Russians were about to attack a nuclear power plant! That Putin guy sure is nuts!" Etc. Controlling the narrative.
>that are clearly reminiscent of those of the 3rd Reich
That's for sure! The members of the Azov Battalion are the scions of WWII-era Nazis (can't even call them "neo-Nazis; they're actual, old-style Nazis, and they even don some of the runic symbolism on their military gear). So when Putin declared that one of the aims of the incursion would be to "de-Nazify" Ukraine, he was being literal.
The Objectivists on this board are simply uninformed. It's understandable, though. Ayn Rand hated Russia, so followers of Ayn Rand should also hate Russia. That seems to be about the extent of "research" most Objectivists here have done on the topic of Ukraine.
As for Tucker Carlson: he's a good interviewer and very likable. Many haven't forgiven him, though, for the insulting way he treated attorney Sidney Powell after the fraud of the 2020 election started to become known (see Dinesh D'Souza's recent documentary on that, titled "2000 Mules" showing video evidence of massive ballot-stuffing by Democrats). The problem isn't Tucker; the problem is that Fox is really part of MSM now (it was been for a long time), whose function within that space is being seen by many (including me) as being "Controlled Opposition", i.e., a venue that is permitted to voice opposition to some of the prevailing narratives but only within certain limits. This applies to Newsmax, as well. Both Fox and Newsmax have taken large sums of money from Big Pharma so you won't hear a peep from them regarding the poisonous effects of the mass vaccination and mass boosting programs, and both news venues have demurred on the January 6th "insurrection" at the Capitol, and the 2020 election fraud.
Regarding the vaccines: as Edward Dowd (former managing director at BlackRock) has said, there's been a 40% increase since the vax rollout in 2021 of "All Cause Mortality" in a demographic that shouldn't be having such an increase: working age adults between 18 and 64. This was first reported a few months ago by the CEO of OneAmerica, a large insurance company headquartered in Indiana. A 40% increase in All Cause Mortality is about 10 Standard Deviations on a Normal Distribution, indicating an event that one wouldn't expect to see even in 200 years. Other insurance carriers, both US and European, have noticed similar kinds of increases over the past year. There are probably several causes (the lockdowns, for sure) but the injurious effects of the mRNA technology on causing long-term damage to the immune system, as well as contributing to blood clots and myocarditis, has now been admitted even by Pfizer during its recent FOIA releases of its trial data. Dowd and others (MDs and PhDs) are expecting huge numbers in excess mortality -- in the many millions, possibly more -- to die in the next few years. Unfortunately, many of those will be children.
Alternative viewpoints that aren't censored or controlled can only be had on alternative platforms such as Rumble, BitChute, Telegram, Gab, Gettr, Parler, Truth Social (Trump's platform), Frank Speech (Mike Lindell's platform), and maybe a few others. Under Elon Musk's helmsmanship, Twitter might rebound as an actual mainstream platform promoting free speech, hence, alternative narratives, but we'll have to wait to see how that all plays out in the next few months.

>Instead of evidence you produced evasions, misrepresentations and ad hominems
No, I produced links to eye-witness testimony, which rational people consider to be a robust form of evidence.  Either these eye-witnesses are lying for some reason or you're not rational. I'll accept either explanation.
I don't know what "misrepresentations" you have in mind. I simply restated the evidence as presented by the historical facts and the testimony of eye-witnesses.
As for the "ad hominems", I think you mean "insults" (not quite the same thing as an ad hominem). I was merely stating the facts of the matter regarding your evident fear of doing your own research. 
Clearly, you're afraid to get Red Pilled over the Ukrainian issue. So are most people.
 

>which is objectively evil Russian aggression
As a response to objectively evil Ukrainian government aggression against other Ukrainians who are ethnically Russian. If you study some history of the subject instead of watching CNN and MSNBC you might learn something and arrive at a conclusion more consistent with the actual historical record.
This is known as the "correspondence theory truth," in which "truth = correspondence to fact"; as opposed to slavishly following MSM, which is known as the "coherence theory of truth," in which "truth = beliefs and statements that are not only internally consistent but concur, and are consistent with, stories and viewpoints espoused by pundits on MSM." As an example of the latter, when Brian Stelter on CNN went to one of the areas that were rioting after the George Floyd killing, and with a straight face told the cameras that "this is mainly a peaceful demonstration" when viewers could plainly see buildings burning in the background and people rioting violently in the streets, there were many viewers who, to this day, deny that there was any violent rioting in the streets because Brian Stelter -- Johnny-on-the-Spot -- told them what to think, and told them how to interpret what they were seeing. That's called "controlling the narrative."
It's like the scene in "The Wizard of Oz" where the little terrier Toto pulls back the curtain, revealing a harmless old man at a machine that amplifies his voice, making him sound menacing, and who then shouts (as a last-ditch attempt to "control the narrative" of Dorothy and her companions), "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!"
>war crimes, and atrocities
False flags. For example, the maternity hospital that was shelled several weeks ago, with reports of dead women and babies, and blamed on Russian forces by western mainstream media, had been evacuated several weeks earlier in February and was being used as a headquarters by Ukrainian military and the Azov battalion. That's why it was shelled by Russian forces. But women and babies were not among the casualties.
The online newscast called "The Hill: Rising" hosted by Kim Iversen had a webcast at the end of February about some of the fake images and newscasts coming out of Ukraine and promoted by mainstream media, such as spectacular nighttime rocket attacks that were actually images from a video game; images of "brave" president Zelensky donning military gear, apparently "ready to appear on the front lines to support his troops" that were actually recycled pictures from a year ago of a training exercise; etc. See link.
The more recent hysteria by MSM over Russian forces "about to attack a nuclear power plant" was a false flag, too. Ukrainian military took over the power plant and fired on Russian forces hoping to goad them into returning the fire (they didn't). Nevertheless, sleepwalkers in the west who swallow Blue Pills handed out to them by MSM got to shake their heads and virtual-signal to one another, "I just saw on The View that those nasty, nasty Russians were about to attack a nuclear power plant! That Putin guy sure is nuts!" Etc. Controlling the narrative.
>that are clearly reminiscent of those of the 3rd Reich
That's for sure! The members of the Azov Battalion are the scions of WWII-era Nazis (can't even call them "neo-Nazis; they're actual, old-style Nazis, and they even don some of the runic symbolism on their military gear). So when Putin declared that one of the aims of the incursion would be to "de-Nazify" Ukraine, he was being literal.
The Objectivists on this board are simply uninformed. It's understandable, though. Ayn Rand hated Russia, so followers of Ayn Rand should also hate Russia. That seems to be about the extent of "research" most Objectivists here have done on the topic of Ukraine.
As for Tucker Carlson: he's a good interviewer and very likable. Many haven't forgiven him, though, for the insulting way he treated attorney Sidney Powell after the fraud of the 2020 election started to become known (see Dinesh D'Souza's recent documentary on that, titled "2000 Mules" showing video evidence of massive ballot-stuffing by Democrats). The problem isn't Tucker; the problem is that Fox is really part of MSM now (it was been for a long time), whose function within that space is being seen by many (including me) as being "Controlled Opposition", i.e., a venue that is permitted to voice opposition to some of the prevailing narratives but only within certain limits. This applies to Newsmax, as well. Both Fox and Newsmax have taken large sums of money from Big Pharma so you won't hear a peep from them regarding the poisonous effects of the mass vaccination and mass boosting programs, and both news venues have demurred on the January 6th "insurrection" at the Capitol, and the 2020 election fraud.
Regarding the vaccines: as Edward Dowd (former managing director at BlackRock) has said, there's been a 40% increase since the vax rollout in 2021 of "All Cause Mortality" in a demographic that shouldn't be having such an increase: working age adults between 18 and 64. This was first reported a few months ago by the CEO of OneAmerica, a large insurance company headquartered in Indiana. A 40% increase in All Cause Mortality is about 10 Standard Deviations on a Normal Distribution, indicating an event that one wouldn't expect to see even in 200 years. Other insurance carriers, both US and European, have noticed similar kinds of increases over the past year. There are probably several causes (the lockdowns, for sure) but the injurious effects of the mRNA technology on causing long-term damage to the immune system, as well as contributing to blood clots and myocarditis, has now been admitted even by Pfizer during its recent FOIA releases of its trial data. Dowd and others (MDs and PhDs) are expecting huge numbers in excess mortality -- in the many millions, possibly more -- to die in the next few years. Unfortunately, many of those will be children.
Alternative viewpoints that aren't censored or controlled can only be had on alternative platforms such as Rumble, BitChute, Telegram, Gab, Gettr, Parler, Truth Social (Trump's platform), Frank Speech (Mike Lindell's platform), and maybe a few others. Under Elon Musk's helmsmanship, Twitter might rebound as an actual mainstream platform promoting free speech, hence, alternative narratives, but we'll have to wait to see how that all plays out in the next few months.

Watch the Jimmy Dore podcast I sent you.
Here's another link to a Jimmy Dore podcast in which he shows an excerpt from a Fox Business News broadcast with guest, Ret. Col. Douglas MacGregor explicitly calling out Zelensky as a puppet:
https://tinyurl.com/2j5shk3p

Zelensky receives money from a Ukrainian oligarch who fled Ukraine for Israel (he also has a Cypriot passport) named Kolomoyski; Zelensky, in turn uses that money (some of it, anyway) to help finance the Nazi Azov Battalion. So the battalion pretty much is the influential entity within the government (and therefore, "runs" it. You object to the term, "runs"? Too bad.) and is the influential element within the entire Ukraine military. Zelensky's entire cabinet, by the way, was "selected" (i.e., installed) by Kolomoyski (apparently, from his Swiss chateau). So Zelensky is a puppet of Kolomoyski's money and of the Azov Battalion's thuggishness. Recent leaked phone calls from Victoria Nuland (Undersecretary of State) admit the U.S. participated in a coup to oust the former president, Poroshenko, for the sake of "regime change" more amenable to U.S. interests (meaning, NATO, and the personal interests of various American oligarchs). Oliver Stone made a documentary about this several years ago titled "Ukraine on Fire." You can find it online.
Was Zelensky fairly elected? He was a popular TV actor and comedian but given the evidence of election fraud in the U.S. (see Dinesh D'Souza's documentary "2000 Mules") and what appears to have been a similar kind of fraud in the recent French election (popular LePen is ahead in all polls and suddenly loses to the unpopular Macron, who immediately declares that he's going to institute the new "Digital ID" passports to everyone) I have little confidence that Zelensky's 73% win with a 95% turnout was legitimate. 

Just before the incursion, Putin declared that he intended to "De-Nazify" Ukraine, another indication that there's little difference between the Nazi Azov Battalion and Ukrainian government, since the rest of the government -- cabinet ministers, at any rate -- were simply installed by Kolomoyski and pretty much do nothing. According to journalists on the ground in Ukraine, most of the Ukrainian military forces have been routed by the Russian army, but they have now fled into populated urban centers, using locals as human shields (just as many Islamist jihadists have done in middle east conflicts with Israel). That means the Russian army has to move at a much slower pace than they otherwise would. I understand from statements made by Dr. Robert Malone (pioneer of mRNA technology in the 1980s, who has come out in the past year as being highly critical of the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna) who also has professional experience in the military intelligence sector, that the 30-or-so bioweapons labs in Ukraine (funded by the U.S.) cannot simply be shelled and demolished since that risks spreading whatever pathogens were being toyed with. Each lab has to be "decommissioned", meaning bioweapons experts have to go into each lab, investigate what's there, and then decommission it, usually by just walling up the entire laboratory. He said this is the usual way in which anthrax labs are handled: you can't just blow them up because the spores are robust and can become airborne. The entire facility has to be walled up (sort of like Chernobyl). Nice.
I would never deny such an inquisitive mind as yours the pleasure of doing your own research on this issue. So do a little homework. Who knows - you might even get "red pilled".

>What are your grounds for this accusation?
Already answered (see above).
Do some homework. The entire Ukrainian government is corrupt (and mainly RUN by a minority of Nazis known as the "Azov Regiment" or "Azov Battalion"). And while doing research, ask yourself why the sons of Joe Biden (Hunter Biden), Nancy and Paul Pelosi (Paul Jr.), and Mitt Romney (he has several; don't remember which one) sit on the boards of directors of energy companies in Ukraine, a topic about which they know nothing. This is all influence-peddling and money-laundering. You might want to introduce yourself to the concept of the "Deep State" since it's seeping into mainstream media from the alternative/fringe/conspiracy media on venues such as BitChute and Rumble.
If you're intimidated by the European press regarding what's going on in Ukraine, you might try starting with an American comedian-turned-political-commentator, Jimmy Dore. He's a lefty slowly getting "red-pilled" on various issues, including Covid, the so-called "vaccines", Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum Agenda 2030, Bill Gates buying up most of American farmland, etc.. He tends to harp occasionally on fabulousness of socialized medicine and "Medicare for All" but aside from that, he's great. Often funny, lots of bad language (F-bombs, etc.). As a stand-up comic he's not in the same class as the late George Carlin (no one is), but he's pretty good on counter-narratives of political news. He's generally good at citing his sources, as well. For example:
 

>What are your grounds for this accusation?
You're serious? Statements by the Azov Battalion espousing Nazism. Many are saying that their members shouldn't even be called "Neo-Nazis"; they're simply good, old-fashioned Nazis, similar to the Ukrainians in WWII who sided with the 3rd Reich. There are also many statements by Ukrainians regarding atrocities against them by the Ukrainian army (not the Russian Federation army). Watch, also news from Europe, especially the French journalist living in Ukraine, Anne-Laure Bonnel. 
Ukraine (the government, not the majority of the people) is a hotbed of corruption, including bioweapons manufacturing (which they call "research", and which our State Department is now calling "Defensive"), human trafficking, and money laundering. That's why, before the military intervention, Putin asserted that he was "De-Nazifying Ukraine." Indeed. Just so.

*** Split from: Objectivists are working to save the world from tyranny--isn't that altruism? ***
>Just today I saw a news report that a gov't official in Russia had said that domestic opponents to Russia's current war in Ukraine will be sent to concentration camps.
What was the news source? Most of what mainstream media has presented to the public regarding Ukraine has been propaganda. Even many images have been shown to be hoaxes.

Ethnic Russians who speak Russian but live in Ukraine don't want to live under a Ukraine government run by a neo-Nazi gang (the Azov Battalion) with a puppet president (Zelensky). The Ukraine government has been shelling the ethnic Russian regions of Ukraine since 2014 and thousands of those Ukrainians have been killed. Additionally, as Undersecretary of State, Victoria Nuland, has confirmed in a recent videotaped Senate hearing, Ukraine has a number of bioweapons laboratories (she called them "research facilities") that we now know through documents released by the Pentagon, were and are, financed by the U.S. Apparently, Mr. Putin doesn't like the idea of U.S.-backed bio-weapons labs on his doorstep, especially given what is now know via leaked emails, etc., from Fauci, Daszak, Baric, et al., regarding gain-of-function research on viruses that began in North Carolina (Chapel Hill, University of N. Carolina, Fort Dietrich) and continued in Wuhan, China at their Institute of Virology. 

Can't understand why anyone would uncritically believe the narrative spun by mainstream media. 

>which is objectively evil Russian aggression
As a response to objectively evil Ukrainian government aggression against other Ukrainians who are ethnically Russian. If you study some history of the subject instead of watching CNN and MSNBC you might learn something and arrive at a conclusion more consistent with the actual historical record.
This is known as the "correspondence theory truth," in which "truth = correspondence to fact"; as opposed to slavishly following MSM, which is known as the "coherence theory of truth," in which "truth = beliefs and statements that are not only internally consistent but concur, and are consistent with, stories and viewpoints espoused by pundits on MSM." As an example of the latter, when Brian Stelter on CNN went to one of the areas that were rioting after the George Floyd killing, and with a straight face told the cameras that "this is mainly a peaceful demonstration" when viewers could plainly see buildings burning in the background and people rioting violently in the streets, there were many viewers who, to this day, deny that there was any violent rioting in the streets because Brian Stelter -- Johnny-on-the-Spot -- told them what to think, and told them how to interpret what they were seeing. That's called "controlling the narrative."
It's like the scene in "The Wizard of Oz" where the little terrier Toto pulls back the curtain, revealing a harmless old man at a machine that amplifies his voice, making him sound menacing, and who then shouts (as a last-ditch attempt to "control the narrative" of Dorothy and her companions), "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!"
>war crimes, and atrocities
False flags. For example, the maternity hospital that was shelled several weeks ago, with reports of dead women and babies, and blamed on Russian forces by western mainstream media, had been evacuated several weeks earlier in February and was being used as a headquarters by Ukrainian military and the Azov battalion. That's why it was shelled by Russian forces. But women and babies were not among the casualties.
The online newscast called "The Hill: Rising" hosted by Kim Iversen had a webcast at the end of February about some of the fake images and newscasts coming out of Ukraine and promoted by mainstream media, such as spectacular nighttime rocket attacks that were actually images from a video game; images of "brave" president Zelensky donning military gear, apparently "ready to appear on the front lines to support his troops" that were actually recycled pictures from a year ago of a training exercise; etc. See link.
The more recent hysteria by MSM over Russian forces "about to attack a nuclear power plant" was a false flag, too. Ukrainian military took over the power plant and fired on Russian forces hoping to goad them into returning the fire (they didn't). Nevertheless, sleepwalkers in the west who swallow Blue Pills handed out to them by MSM got to shake their heads and virtual-signal to one another, "I just saw on The View that those nasty, nasty Russians were about to attack a nuclear power plant! That Putin guy sure is nuts!" Etc. Controlling the narrative.
>that are clearly reminiscent of those of the 3rd Reich
That's for sure! The members of the Azov Battalion are the scions of WWII-era Nazis (can't even call them "neo-Nazis; they're actual, old-style Nazis, and they even don some of the runic symbolism on their military gear). So when Putin declared that one of the aims of the incursion would be to "de-Nazify" Ukraine, he was being literal.
The Objectivists on this board are simply uninformed. It's understandable, though. Ayn Rand hated Russia, so followers of Ayn Rand should also hate Russia. That seems to be about the extent of "research" most Objectivists here have done on the topic of Ukraine.
As for Tucker Carlson: he's a good interviewer and very likable. Many haven't forgiven him, though, for the insulting way he treated attorney Sidney Powell after the fraud of the 2020 election started to become known (see Dinesh D'Souza's recent documentary on that, titled "2000 Mules" showing video evidence of massive ballot-stuffing by Democrats). The problem isn't Tucker; the problem is that Fox is really part of MSM now (it was been for a long time), whose function within that space is being seen by many (including me) as being "Controlled Opposition", i.e., a venue that is permitted to voice opposition to some of the prevailing narratives but only within certain limits. This applies to Newsmax, as well. Both Fox and Newsmax have taken large sums of money from Big Pharma so you won't hear a peep from them regarding the poisonous effects of the mass vaccination and mass boosting programs, and both news venues have demurred on the January 6th "insurrection" at the Capitol, and the 2020 election fraud.
Regarding the vaccines: as Edward Dowd (former managing director at BlackRock) has said, there's been a 40% increase since the vax rollout in 2021 of "All Cause Mortality" in a demographic that shouldn't be having such an increase: working age adults between 18 and 64. This was first reported a few months ago by the CEO of OneAmerica, a large insurance company headquartered in Indiana. A 40% increase in All Cause Mortality is about 10 Standard Deviations on a Normal Distribution, indicating an event that one wouldn't expect to see even in 200 years. Other insurance carriers, both US and European, have noticed similar kinds of increases over the past year. There are probably several causes (the lockdowns, for sure) but the injurious effects of the mRNA technology on causing long-term damage to the immune system, as well as contributing to blood clots and myocarditis, has now been admitted even by Pfizer during its recent FOIA releases of its trial data. Dowd and others (MDs and PhDs) are expecting huge numbers in excess mortality -- in the many millions, possibly more -- to die in the next few years. Unfortunately, many of those will be children.
Alternative viewpoints that aren't censored or controlled can only be had on alternative platforms such as Rumble, BitChute, Telegram, Gab, Gettr, Parler, Truth Social (Trump's platform), Frank Speech (Mike Lindell's platform), and maybe a few others. Under Elon Musk's helmsmanship, Twitter might rebound as an actual mainstream platform promoting free speech, hence, alternative narratives, but we'll have to wait to see how that all plays out in the next few months.

Recommended: An interesting and informative (if long) livestream podcast by a filmmaker/writer named Gonzalo Lira, who lives in Ukraine. He covers most of the relevant facts regarding the oligarch Kolomoiski (living in Switzerland) who helped place a comedian and actor, Zelensky, in power, as well as paying him to finance the Nazi Azov Battalion. According to Lira (in hiding as of the time he recorded this podcast) all of the cabinet ministers were "selected" by Kolomoiski and then duly "appointed" by Zelensky. The ministers are all thugs (according to Lira), as are the members of the Azov Battalion. The atrocities highlighted by the western media (the maternity hospital, for example) are mainly examples of classic "False Flag" operations, committed by the Ukrainian army (including, of course, Azov) against Ukrainian citizens, and then blamed on Putin and the Russian army. 
Retired Colonel Douglas MacGregor, Aaron Mate, Jimmy Dore, Gonzalo Lira, and other commentators whose links I've posted, are crystal clear on the reasons for the Russian incursion: Russia sees the expansion of NATO into Ukraine -- with the strong possibility of western (i.e., US) nukes stationed along its eastern border, just a few kilometers from Russia -- as an existential threat to its sovereignty, in exactly the same way and for the same reason, that the US under the JFK administration viewed Soviet nukes in Cuba -- just 90 miles away from the US -- as an existential threat to its own sovereignty. Lira posits hypothetically how the US would react if China, for example, formed military alliances with countries in South America, and then an otherwise neutral buffer-zone like Mexico were pressured to join such an alliance: would the US simply say, "Well, Mexico's a sovereign country so it therefore has the right to join any kind of alliance it pleases" or would it say, "such an alliance is ultimately controlled by China, and if Mexico ceases to be a neutral buffer between the US and the China/S.America alliance, we'll be seeing Chinese nukes on the northern border of Mexico, right next to Texas". I think the latter. And Lira, et al., are right when they aver that the US would view that as an existential threat to its own sovereignty and would probably take military action against Mexico...not to conquer territory but to keep Mexico "neutral", i.e., as a buffer between itself and the China/S.America alliance.
Same with Russia and Ukraine. Russia wants Ukraine neutral.
According to these sources, the outcome of this incursion is a foregone conclusion: the much larger, better equipped Russian army will win, especially since (as stated above) they view this issue as an "existential threat" and are willing to do whatever is necessary to keep Ukraine neutral AND to "de-Nazify" Ukraine by killing the Nazis...meaning killing the members of the Azov Battalion. The latter know this, of course, which (according to these sources) seems to be the main reason Zelensky/Kolomoiski/Azov are trying to keep the conflict going, as well as trying to coax other countries into the conflict -- especially the US -- in the hopes of starting a proxy war between the US and Russia, and in the hopes of extending the conflict long enough that they can continue surviving, probably by fleeing the country (just as Nazis in Germany did when they saw the war had turned against them).
It's important to counter the false narrative coming out of western mainstream media since the latter seem pretty much to be warmongers interested in getting the US involved in what would clearly be World War 3. To understand more on how and why US mainstream media all seems to be in lockstep with their narrative regarding Ukraine, look into the CIA's "Operation Mockingbird", as well as Obama's signing into law the right of the US government to promote propaganda to the public (he essentially reversed an earlier law that had forbidden the federal government from propagandizing to the public).
And THAT would be a perfect opportunity -- along with whatever new pandemics (or PLANdemics) the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates, et al., have in store for us -- to impose the "Great Reset" on everyone. You can kiss goodbye any liberties you're now enjoying if that happens. For an example of what that could look like, see what's going on in the megacity of Shanghai, China.
 

*** Split from: Objectivists are working to save the world from tyranny--isn't that altruism? ***
>Just today I saw a news report that a gov't official in Russia had said that domestic opponents to Russia's current war in Ukraine will be sent to concentration camps.
What was the news source? Most of what mainstream media has presented to the public regarding Ukraine has been propaganda. Even many images have been shown to be hoaxes.

Ethnic Russians who speak Russian but live in Ukraine don't want to live under a Ukraine government run by a neo-Nazi gang (the Azov Battalion) with a puppet president (Zelensky). The Ukraine government has been shelling the ethnic Russian regions of Ukraine since 2014 and thousands of those Ukrainians have been killed. Additionally, as Undersecretary of State, Victoria Nuland, has confirmed in a recent videotaped Senate hearing, Ukraine has a number of bioweapons laboratories (she called them "research facilities") that we now know through documents released by the Pentagon, were and are, financed by the U.S. Apparently, Mr. Putin doesn't like the idea of U.S.-backed bio-weapons labs on his doorstep, especially given what is now know via leaked emails, etc., from Fauci, Daszak, Baric, et al., regarding gain-of-function research on viruses that began in North Carolina (Chapel Hill, University of N. Carolina, Fort Dietrich) and continued in Wuhan, China at their Institute of Virology. 

Can't understand why anyone would uncritically believe the narrative spun by mainstream media. 

*** Split from: Objectivists are working to save the world from tyranny--isn't that altruism? ***
>Just today I saw a news report that a gov't official in Russia had said that domestic opponents to Russia's current war in Ukraine will be sent to concentration camps.
What was the news source? Most of what mainstream media has presented to the public regarding Ukraine has been propaganda. Even many images have been shown to be hoaxes.

Ethnic Russians who speak Russian but live in Ukraine don't want to live under a Ukraine government run by a neo-Nazi gang (the Azov Battalion) with a puppet president (Zelensky). The Ukraine government has been shelling the ethnic Russian regions of Ukraine since 2014 and thousands of those Ukrainians have been killed. Additionally, as Undersecretary of State, Victoria Nuland, has confirmed in a recent videotaped Senate hearing, Ukraine has a number of bioweapons laboratories (she called them "research facilities") that we now know through documents released by the Pentagon, were and are, financed by the U.S. Apparently, Mr. Putin doesn't like the idea of U.S.-backed bio-weapons labs on his doorstep, especially given what is now know via leaked emails, etc., from Fauci, Daszak, Baric, et al., regarding gain-of-function research on viruses that began in North Carolina (Chapel Hill, University of N. Carolina, Fort Dietrich) and continued in Wuhan, China at their Institute of Virology. 

Can't understand why anyone would uncritically believe the narrative spun by mainstream media. 

> I use 'existence' to denote everything that exists, including the material, immaterial ...
Good. So there's no "primacy of mind" vs. "primacy of matter." Mind and matter together comprise the totality we call "the universe". Therefore:
1) We cannot validly claim that if there were no minds at all, matter would still exist. It's a bit like saying "If there were no North Pole, the South Pole would still exist. No. "North Pole" and "South Pole" depend on each, as concepts and as geographical locations, for their mutual existence.
2) A more accurate way of characterizing the relationship between mind and matter is not that the former simply "observes" the latter, but rather that they "participate in each other"; as some have said, there's an "interpenetration" of mind in matter, and of matter in mind.
I might possibly grant the independent existence of so-called "fundamental particles" and "space"; but not the representation of those particles+space as processed by perception and higher conceptual thinking: i.e., trees, clouds, rocks, butterflies, etc. The entire "Qualitative World" of entities and things that have sensible qualities -- softness, hardness, length, scent, etc. -- is a participation between those fundamental particles (which Peikoff once called "Puffs of Meta-Energy") and mind.
Philosophers and psychologists who have studied creativity have suggested that the act of creation is an act of breaking down the artificial barrier (mainly accomplished through language) between so-called "object" and "subject." That might help to explain why many creations seem to have resulted when the person's mind was relaxed but not to the point of sleep; just focused on some small task: shaving, driving, etc. Suddenly an unexpected answer to some problem they were trying to solve just "popped into their head." It's similar to the phenomenon of "lucid dreaming," in which the dreamer is just awake enough to grasp that he's dreaming, but in which he's asleep enough so that the dream imagery -- often an actual narrative story -- goes on by itself without his conscious intervention.

Interesting. Long-winded but interesting.
I'm fascinated by the amount of lively discussion it generated.
In any case, I'll have to peruse it later today.