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”The mental conflict that occurs when beliefs or assumptions are contradicted by new information. The unease or tension that the conflict arouses in a person is relieved by one of several defensive maneuvers: the person rejects, explains away, or avoids the new information, persuades himself that no conflict really exists, reconciles the differences, or resorts to any other defensive means of preserving stability or order in his conception of the world and of himself.” -Encyclopedia Britannica My post last year about kids defying the ACLU brought me back to a point I have been making for several years. Socialism collapses...

The sociopolitical concept known as socialism and/or communism is not new. In fact, it is very ancient. Some ancient Greeks attempted to make communism a reality. That experiment ultimately failed. Plato spoke of it admiringly, even though he understood that it was not feasible. However, the first attempt at building socialism was in ancient Shinar. It came about when the terrible-willed Nimrod (Amraphel in the Old Testament, also Gilgamesh and Hammurabi) the great-grandson of Noah “killed” God and then declared himself “two-parts god, only one-part man.” The pyramid-shaped ziggurat (Tower of Babel) built by Nimrod symbolizes socialism/communism, a sociopolitical system...

Democrats deserve a Guinness World Re cord award for their election-season cogni tive dissonance. President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and White House senior adviser David Axelrod accused Republicans last week of benefiting from "money from foreign corporations" -- which liberals claim the US Chamber of Commerce is funneling into domestic political ads. Endangered Democratic candidates across the country are dutifully parroting the line of attack. It's beyond comical to watch the party that cries "RAAAACISM" whenever conservatives question their shady foreign funny money suddenly sounding the alarm over non-US campaign cash. And it's beyond galling to hear Democrats fret...

Obama's longtime minister was the infamous Rev. Wright. One of the tenets of Wright's peculiar theology that shocked and outraged most European-Americans was that the AIDS virus was invented by whites to exterminate blacks. While this issue was swept under the American political rug by the mainstream media (Obama simply resigned from the church, and the issue immediately died), the question remains why so obviously a false and pernicious belief is so prevalent in the black community. I would suggest that the answer is to be found in the well-established psychological theory of cognitive dissonance. This theory has three tenets....

The negative spiritual and intellectual consequence of believing two mutually exclusive concepts is "cognitive dissonance." Our interaction as a society with Islam is a direct cause of "cognitive dissonance" for us as individuals and as a culture.  Resolution of the contradiction requires the rejection of one of the concepts as false. If we continue to ignore our cognitive dissonance about Islam the consequences are dire: we will lose our civilization. Islam is much more than a religion; it is a complete civilization that includes politics (caliphate), jurisprudence (Sharia law), war (jihad), and a deliberately misleading "religion of peace." The doctrine...

To ensure that psychiatry “permeate every educational activity of national life” and “infiltrate the professional and social activities of [all] people” was a global goal that originated with British Brigadier General Dr. John Rawlings Rees in a 1940 speech to the National Council for Mental Hygiene. He ended on an ominous note: “Though our knowledge be incomplete … I think we must imitate the Totalitarians and organize some kind of fifth column activity.” Canadian colleague Dr. Brock Chisholm chimed in with sinister comments of his own at the close of the war in 1946, in a speech to the World...

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post saying Cindy Sheehan would probably not do very well against Nancy Pelosi, and therefore I was sorry she had decided to run. I said she was more valuable to the antiwar movement as an activist. I said leftists waste a lot of time on futile electoral contests, and cited examples of such contests. These remarks, which were couched in terms of deepest respect for Cindy Sheehan, have evoked much bile and wrath in this blog's comment section and elsewhere in the blogosphere. So much fun are commenters having discussing what a traitor...

Glenn Sacks Discusses the Texas Frozen Embryo Case on the Nationally-Syndicated Mike McConnell Show (Audio Available) Fathers' rights advocate Glenn Sacks discussed the controversial Texas frozen embryo case on the nationally-syndicated Mike McConnell Show yesterday. The case involves Augusta Roman and her ex-husband Randy Roman, who during their marriage tried for several years to have a child (and had one miscarriage) before undergoing infertility treatments. The day before the embryos were to be implanted, Randy told her that he was troubled by certain aspects of their relationship and wanted to wait to implant the embryos until they had resolved their...

Not long ago, in an act of near-adolescent abandon, my wife and I had unprotected sex. We were not trying to have a baby; rather, in the heat of the moment, we never quite got around to using birth control. When we realized what had happened, . . . my wife called her doctor and asked for a prescription for Plan B, the "morning after" birth-control pill. ***** Of course, I'm not immune to emotion either, especially For my wife and me, the decision to use Plan B was hardly casual. Although we both support abortion rights and favor the...

There's no helping you. This site is now just a diversion -- like a train wreck. This site is inherently for and about raving egomaniacs, and Jim's site policies -- which amount to excluding reality and actual dialogue in favor of political/militaristic pornography -- is conducive to cognitive dissonance, which at the times your worldview is threatened leads you into psychotic breaks (on the political cognitive plane, that is, and just maybe in other realms too). Not to mention that your baseline politics is based in mythology about American demographics, science, economics, ethics etc. You spoonfeed each other in the...

My teammate X was sprawled on the hotel bed, muttering "Why? Why?" as he contemplated the failure of his legal genius. X was the smartest member of my law school's moot court team. He wasn't the finest of public speakers and his legal writing style wasn't textbook perfect, but who could question his monumental intellect? He won the award for highest first-year GPA. He read abstruse law and philosophy journals for fun. He debated with professors after class, exercising a subject mastery that left onlookers slack-jawed. And when he proudly announced to his moot court teammates that he had found...

Clooney: Liberal 'As Loud As I Can' Actor George Clooney tells Newsweek's Film Critic David Ansen he's upset 'liberal' has become a dirty word. "It blows my mind, because [unlike conservatives] we don't have to put the word 'compassionate' in front of it to say we actually give a s--t about people. I'm going to keep saying 'liberal' as loud as I can and as often as I can," he says in the October 10 issue (on newsstands Monday, October 3). Ansen talked to Clooney while he was in New York promoting the New York Film Festival debut of "Good...

Interesting e-mail from reader B.G.: "I believe your skepticism regarding Lt. Col. Shaffer’s memory – 'whether the otherwise obscure name of "Mohammed Atta" might have become part of their recollections after the fact because it became so famous' – deserves your reevaluation. "I would contend that whatever Shaffer knew about Mohammed Atta and the Brooklyn cell would have been reinforced in, and not 'become part of,' Shaffer’s memory on and in the days immediately after 9/11. Other elements of the story, such as having three meetings to transfer this information cancelled at the last minute, and the resulting feelings of...

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY AND GROUP DYNAMICS Studies have shown that today's cults use a stronger form of control than those of 50 years ago. The advent of new psychological experiments in the 60's and 70's have produced the modern methods of mind control which are far more sophisticated than the BEHAVIOUR MODIFICATION TECHNIQUES and THOUGHT REFORM developed by the Chinese. To understand mind control you need a basic understanding of BEHAVIOUR MODIFICATION TECHNIQUES. What is "behaviour modification." Simply described, it is "reward or punishment for actions" association. It was used on you as a child whenever you were being commended or...