Let’s be honest, Democrats.

Joe Biden was elected — I will not relitigate the “stolen election” debate in this article — for one reason: to get rid of Donald Trump. Period. The Democrat Party could have nominated a blind, intellectually disabled squirrel, and the results of the 2020 election would not have changed.

But let’s be clear: No one loves Joe Biden. //

The Economist
@TheEconomist
Asked for their opinion of Joe Biden, some Democrats who saw him speak in Arlington this week said they were “indifferent”, others claimed to have “no view”
No one loves Joe Biden -- Americans elected the president to get rid of his predecessor. They’re not sure what else he can do
economist.com
10:00 AM · Oct 29, 2021 //

Diamond and Silk®
@DiamondandSilk
Disaster: What Happened to Biden's Approval Rating Since Taking Office Hasn't Happened to Any Other President Since WWII
Disaster: What Happened to Biden's Approval Rating Since Taking Office Hasn't Happened to Any Other...
Joe Biden has suffered a larger approval rating drop at the start of his term than any president since World War II, according to a new Gallup poll. Biden’s approval rating dropped from 56% in Q1
diamondandsilk.com
11:31 AM · Oct 27, 2021 //

GennaroPatriot • 27 minutes ago

"but,but,but Trump's tweets were so mean..."

Jaye -> GennaroPatriot • 22 minutes ago • edited

Trump's tweets consumed a few seconds of reading time .

Mocking Bird Media spent the next 24 hours hashing and rehashing them.

Understand "The Method" proposed by Dr Norman Vincent Peale in this book The Power of Positive Thinking, since Trump long ago admitted he was a follower of Dr Peale at a NYC's Marble Collegiate Church.

Then you will understand why Trump cleared the air with his early morning tweets, and then spent the rest of the day accomplishing extraordinary things - promises made, promises kept.

While the hate-media was still mucking and re-mucking his one early morning tweet. All of this was well known well before the 2016 election. Trump has been in the spotlight for decades.

*See Peter Grave's Biography series on PBS- for an early extended Trump interview. WYSIWYG

It’s great that so many have copies of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, but very unfortunate that so few have read it. The alleged “supply chain” problems we’re enduring right now were explained by Smith in the book’s opening pages.

Smith wrote about a pin factory, and the then remarkable truth that one man in the factory working alone could maybe – maybe – produce one pin each day. But several men working together could produce tens of thousands.

Work divided is what enables the very work specialization that drives enormous productivity. If this was true in an 18th century pin factory, imagine how vivid the truth is today. Figure that something as basic as the creation of a pencil is the consequence of global cooperation, so what kind of remarkable global symmetry leads to the creation of an airplane, car, or computer? The kind that can’t be planned is the short answer, but more realistically the only answer. //

Really, who was talking about supply-chain shortages or the impossibility that is demand-driven inflation in early 2020? Very few were, and that’s because the U.S. economy was largely free then. At which point politicians panicked. And in panicking, they imposed a rather draconian form of command-and-control on the U.S. economy. //

Some were free to work, some weren’t, and more still were free to work and operate their businesses within strict political limits. From freedom to central planning in a very small amount of time. At which point it’s worth considering once again the simple pin factory that Smith witnessed in the 18th century versus the global cooperation that was the norm 19 months ago. //

The supply lines of February 2020 were impossibly complicated structures that no politician could ever hope to design. Think billions of individuals around the world pursuing their narrow work specialization on the way to enormous global plenty. Put another way, the shelves in economically free countries were heaving with all manner of products based on economic cooperation that was staggering in scope. Brilliant as some experts claim to be, and brilliant as some politicians think they are as they look in the mirror, they could never construct the web of trillions of economic relationships that prevailed before the lockdowns. But they could destroy the web. And they did; that, or they severely impaired it. //

We know from the 20th century that when politicians, authoritarians or both substitute their intensely narrow knowledge for that of the marketplace that immense want for very little (and lousy) supply is the logical result. Yes it is. When we’re not economically free, bare shelves are the inevitable result.

Conversely, product and service abundance is a certain consequence yet again of the infinite actions and trillions of economic relationships entered into by billions of people. These commercial tie-ups were constructed by consenting individuals over many years and many decades only for them to be wrecked by a political class arrogantly seeking to protect us from ourselves. That’s what happens when command-and-control replaces voluntary order. The remunerative ties that bind us fray, or vanish altogether. Consenting, profitable economic activity was suddenly illegal. Yet politicians and other experts are only now wringing their hands about a lack of supply?

Really, what did they think was going to happen? While politicians couldn’t ever create or legislate billions working together around the world, they could and can surely break voluntary economic arrangements.

"The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature."

“But what can we do to stop it? We haven’t the strength.”

We have so hopelessly ceded our humanity that for the modest handouts of today we are ready to surrender up all principles, our soul, all the labors of our ancestors, all the prospects of our descendants—anything to avoid disrupting our meager existence. We have lost our strength, our pride, our passion. We do not even fear a common nuclear death, do not fear a third world war (perhaps we’ll hide away in some crevice), but fear only to take a civic stance! We hope only not to stray from the herd, not to set out on our own, and risk suddenly having to make do without the white bread, the hot water heater, a Moscow residency permit. //

But we can do—everything!—even if we comfort and lie to ourselves that this is not so. It is not “they” who are guilty of everything, but we ourselves, only we! //

But it will never come unstuck by itself, if we all, every day, continue to acknowledge, glorify, and strengthen it, if we do not, at the least, recoil from its most vulnerable point.

From lies. //

And therein we find, neglected by us, the simplest, the most accessible key to our liberation: a personal nonparticipation in lies! Even if all is covered by lies, even if all is under their rule, let us resist in the smallest way: Let their rule hold not through me!

And this is the way to break out of the imaginary encirclement of our inertness, the easiest way for us and the most devastating for the lies. For when people renounce lies, lies simply cease to exist. Like parasites, they can only survive when attached to a person.

We are not called upon to step out onto the square and shout out the truth, to say out loud what we think—this is scary, we are not ready. But let us at least refuse to say what we do not think!

This is the way, then, the easiest and most accessible for us given our deep-seated organic cowardice, much easier than (it’s scary even to utter the words) civil disobedience à la Gandhi.

Our way must be: Never knowingly support lies! Having understood where the lies begin (and many see this line differently)—step back from that gangrenous edge! Let us not glue back the flaking scales of the Ideology, not gather back its crumbling bones, nor patch together its decomposing garb, and we will be amazed how swiftly and helplessly the lies will fall away, and that which is destined to be naked will be exposed as such to the world.