Anyone who is part of the liberty movement or who has uncovered uncomfortable truths about our government but who have had trouble discussing these topics with others is often running into cognitive dissonance.  In fact, cognitive dissonance is the most challenging obstacle for liberty minded people to overcome.  People are very resistant to ideas that they have not heard before and does not fit into their world view.  This is especially challenging for libertarians because they do not fit into either the two categories of “left” and “right” that the media force feeds down our throat.  People are trained that all political opinions can somehow be distilled into two camps and that everyone must fit into these categories.  When someone is told that this left/right divide is false and that it is a means of control, people immediately become defensive.  Their entire lives have been built around this left/right belief.  They view everyone as on either their own side or the other side.  Never mind that their own politicians constantly break their own supposed moral code (Bush doubling the size of the Federal Government or Obama doubling down on drone strikes and the police state).  People claim that these are breaks from the norm and that “their” politician’s ideology means something.  After all, the other guy is worse!  They always have an excuse to keep voting the same way hoping for change and never getting it.  The alternative idea is too disturbing.  That political change is almost entirely impossible.  That American people are being duped.  That “Powers at Be” will never let any politician close to the Presidency that will actually change the system.   These thoughts go against everything we have learned our entire lives.  Democracy is supposed to give voice to the people.  Democracy supposed to bring power from the elite to the common man.  In truth, democracy has never been about the common man.  Democracy has in actuality been the greatest tool of oppression that the elite have ever wielded.  In the days of Kings, people knew from whence their oppression came.  If a King made a law that people did not like or had his agents patrolling all roads handing out fines and sometimes even imprisonment, the people knew whose laws they were and whose agents they were dealing with.  This is one reason why king’s had to be careful what laws they made.  They might spark a rebellion if they stepped to far. Now, thankfully, in our enlightened age we have democracy!  The people are now subject to such an enumerable amount of laws such that the average person commits three felonies a day!    Instead of the Law protecting people from their government, it has become a tool of the government to selectively target anyone it wants.  We were supposed to be a nation of laws and not of men but this is where things have degenerated to.  Your average citizen has trouble accepting this.

People do not want to lose faith in the system that they grew up believing in.  They respond with cogitative dissonance. I do not blame them.  No one really wants to hear the truth of such things.  The truth is heart wrenching.  I have compared it to losing ones faith in God.  I have heard someone else (I don’t remember who) comparing it to someone waking up one day and finding out that there mother is a whore and that they are bastards. In a way it is true.  Their government is not the protecting father figure that they have been told.  It is often capable of great evil.

It is said that the truth shall set you free.  This is why many people in the liberty movement divide people between those who are still asleep and those that are awake instead of the usual left right paradigm.  Everyday we need to pursue truth no matter where it takes us.  Remember that the biggest hurdle to overcome with others is cognitive dissonance.  Let us be wise enough to understand cognitive dissonance and wake people up in as gentle of a manner as possible.

More here

The kind people at the FCC are concerned about the quality of news that the American people are getting. Therefore it only makes sense that that FCC puts agents into news rooms get the official story from the state.  We don’t want any crazy theories being spread about do we? Thank goodness for the federal government.  What would we do without them.

The great libertarian Judge Napolitano covers the story here.

Tom Woods Explains!

Video below is a great speech by Mr. Block.  To bad it was cut short.  The last 20 minutes get very interesting.

I was always kind of liked the Daily Show.  I thought they were misguided left-wingers but sincere people unlike those hacks at MSNBC who simply back whatever the Democrats do.  They seemed to be one of the only places to give Ron Paul a decent shack unlike the mainstream networks.  Now it seems that they are destroying their previously decent track record with their interview with Peter Schiff.  I personally like Peter Schiff.  He was the person that made me aware of Austrian Economics. His views are almost identical to that of Ron Paul.  Ron Paul would have the same objections to the minimum wage.  So why attack Peter Schiff but leave Ron Paul alone?  Probably because the Daily Show knows that attacking Ron Paul would alienate a huge number of their viewers while Schiff is not as well known to the public or their audience.

I am in great debt to Peter Schiff for introducing me to the Austrian School of Economics.  I hope the people at the Daily Show will read some Austrian Economics and maybe change their false belief that raising the minimum wage helps the poor. Schiff’s response is in the video below.

Police restrain man in “devil’s chair” while they pepper spay him to death.

Full story here and here

Call me skeptical but I do find these videos interesting.

More information here.

  At least that is what people believed in the 70s.  Climate experts claimed the next ice age was right around the corner. You have to watch the video yourself to believe it.

Once again Gary North has some insightful words on the Duck Dynasty Debacle.

Reality Check

What A&E has done was best described by astronaut Gus Grissom half a century ago, as recorded for posterity in The Right Stuff. It has committed a deviant act: symbolic bestiality. A&E has screwed the pooch.

A&E has just lost a franchise that generates almost half a billion dollars a year in product sales.

Can you spell “dumb”? The only hope is that buyers do not figure out that they are making money for A&E.

Let’s see if Walmart follows A&E’s lead.

The Robertsons can cut a deal with Walmart or Target 12 months after the last Duck Dynasty show airs in a few months, if the family decides to start a new show. A&E will then get leftovers.

We see here a failure to honor a familiar principle: count the cost. Choose your tactics accordingly. Do not overplay your hand. The great master of this was the Leftist organizer, Saul Alinsky. He assessed his strength. He assessed his opponents’ strength. Then he adopted a plan of action. He understood what it takes for a tiny minority to gain leverage. In Rules for Radicals (1972), he wrote this:

We will start with the system because there is no other place to start from except political lunacy. It is most important for those of us who want revolutionary change to understand that revolution must be preceded by reformation. To assume that a political revolution can survive without a supporting base of popular reformation is to ask for the impossible in politics. Men don’t like to step abruptly out of the security of familiar experience; they need a bridge to cross from their own experience to a new way. A revolutionary organizer must shake up the prevailing patterns of their lives — agitate, create disenchantment and discontent with the current values, to produce, if not a passion for change, at least a passive, affirmative, non-challenging climate. “The revolution was effected before the war commenced; John Adams wrote. “The Revolution was in the hearts and minds of the people. . . . This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments and affections of the people was the real American Revolution.” A revolution without a prior reformation would collapse or become a totalitarian tyranny.

From day one, the people at A&E violated this tactical rule.

“LET’S SHOW PHIL WHO’S BOSS!”

Phil Robertson is a curmudgeon’s curmudgeon. He is almost perfect. As the folks in Hollywood are said to say, it is as if he was sent by central casting.

If you have seen him on Duck Dynasty, you know that he is articulate. He has a peculiar way of speaking, which I noticed almost from the beginning. But his eloquence is unique. It is a strange eloquence. He grabs your attention, not simply because of what he says, but because of the way that he says it. It is no-frills speech. He does not waste a word. And he chooses his words carefully.

There is no question that A&E had no idea that this program would become the dominant cable show in history. There is no way that anybody could have predicted that. Robertson himself did not think it would work. But it did.

The producers of the show initially did their best to suppress its Christian overtones. As Robertson said before the recent flap, by removing references to Jesus whenever possible, the producers tried to make the family something it wasn’t. The editors bleeped out words, as if the men were using profanity. The story is here, posted in April 2013.

Continue with the rest of Gary North’s article Here