April 2020

Deterioration of standards resulted in deterioration of the economy, as incompetents shoved out rational persons. Incompetents do not understand that standards are relevant. So they assume they can impose economic success through force of will. Nothing works that way.

Even worse, incompetents assume they can rip everyone off and get an improved economy out of it. All they do is drain the economy moving resources into a world of gambling casinos (called financialization) which is disconnected from the rest of the economy.

What incompetents assume is economic success strips the economy of necessary resources. Success means moving resources upward, which means unavailable to everyone else.

What incompetents miss is how to produce a functional economy. They miss the constructivity element. Obsessive exploitation removes constructivity from considerations.

The most basic social standard is using objective reality as the determining influence. It's hard to find objective reality in the slug fest. Instead, it is implications, innuendo and intuition that positions are based upon, not identifiable realities and established procedures.

The U.S. is no longer competitive on a global scale. It has been cut off from the global economy by incompetence. Political shenanigans will not correct the problem.

Economically, China is rapidly replacing the U.S., and on a much larger scale, but China cannot innovate. No one can innovate the way the U.S. used to, because major advances require diversity, opportunity and scale that only the U.S. had. Europe couldn't do anything similar. Steve Jobs shows why. He had a life-time of freedom and opportunity to do what he knew had to be done in creating the smart phone. Engineers can't do anything similar, because they have to work on assigned tasks.

The small steps that engineers make are often called innovation, but they are routine and not the same as the large steps. One of the differences is that the small steps of engineers tend to disappear as easily as they form, while large-step innovation produces permanent results. In other words, the small steps of engineers are adaptations, often called innovations but should be called adaptations, not innovations.

Another example of large-step innovation is the owner of a ball bearing company figuring out how to make smaller ball bearings which are needed for instruments and small technical devices. That sort of improvement isn't going to disappear with the culture. And it is the type of progress that is becoming impossible in the exploitation social order that drains the economy and put incompetents in control.

But the U.S. can't hang on to the competitiveness it had, let alone make progress. The reason is power mongering. The problem is that the success in the U.S. that created major social structures resulted in sources of power including corporations, universities, organizations and bureaucracies, while all sources of power are taken over by incompetents who collaborate and conspire to monger power. They fight a war against rationality and persons who produce rationality. As they took over the social structures in the U.S. and converted them into power structures, they made the structures nonfunctional. The power mongers cannot maintain what they acquired, let alone make further progress.

The deterioration shows up in the way science is handled. Progressive used to make sure science was easy to access and available to everyone. The Biological Abstracts and other abstracts show the process. They were indexed five ways to make sure information was easy to find and free to everyone.

Now, science is inaccessible to all by a few specialists. It's hidden on computers behind pay walls and privilege walls. To search for something in a library now days, a librarian, who has never studied and iota of science, has to go through a computer looking for scientific information. The result is darkness in science and fraud being protected by unaccountability to the public.

That standard was put in place and sanctified by conservatives who took over the world in 1981. They said that the business model of competition was the answer to everything. The claimed competition was nothing but a promotion of exploitation. There is no competition in the darkness of exploitation.

Supposedly, businesses need to make money at science by concealing information. When paper was used, it was expensive but available to everyone being paid for by the government. Now that the information costs nothing to put on computers, it is inaccessible to the public, and the result is fraud in science promoted by unaccountability to the public.

Rational persons evolved social structures and technology over 5,000 years for solving peoples' problems. Then incompetent corrupters took over everything and used it for partying at everyone else's expense. Everything is running into the ground, because the corrupters cannot maintain the social structures and technology that they acquired.

All the incompetents can do with the exploits which they steal from others is entertain themselves; they cannot sustain anything.

Incompetent Dominators Are Pretenders And Totalitarians

Incompetent corrupters assume they can pretend their success into existence. It only works for partying. It doesn't work for technology. Someone needs to know what they are doing where there is technology.

Greenhouse gases, renewable energy, electric vehicles and self-driving are not credible. They are pretenses of incompetents having the answers to everything. Pretending keeps degenerates in power, where truth would expose them for the corrupters that they are.

Pretending is the substitute for knowledge that incompetents need to justify their domination of society. Totalitarianism is required with the pretending. In replacing objective reality with pretended reality, the pretenses are not credible, so they only exist where they can be imposed and enforced without opposition.

Totalitarian dictators need public support, and the reason why they often get support is because of the belief that pretending is a solution to problems, which is demagoguery—such as Trump reviving the rust belt and brining the manufacturing back, while he can't spell those words without someone else doing it for him. Or claiming to end all wars while threatening to obliterate countries which make him angry and sending love letters to the world's most threatening dictator.

Along with the technological ignorance of pretenders is the assumption that it's possible to beat someone up to get what they want, as if fixing attitudes is all it takes to produce success. Persons who are beat up are less able to solve problems, but pretenders don't know that.

Pretenders tend to guess wrong about who is going to prevail in beating up who. The Nazis didn't know that Eisenhower would prevail over them. The world recovered not by beating up Europe but by changing the standard to cooperation.

What has become apparent in recent times is the attempt by incompetent corrupters to normalize corruption. They want to reduce the social order to their level of corruption and pretend that there is something normal and acceptable about it, so they can endlessly corrupt the social order, as if there were no other concept of what human existence should be. One method is to redescribe history as if their corruptions were virtues. Another method is to stifle journalism and freedom of speech while demanding positivism and worship. Creating "the banality of evil."

Addendum

December 30, 2021

What the emergence of fascism shows is how elements of corruption below the surface were brought to the surface.

One of the most significant elements of corruption in creating fascism is destruction of information and sources of information. Of course, now days, that means the internet. It shows how the deterioration has been occurring.

A major drive to reduce the information handling tools to ineffectiveness has long been visible. Social media and email are reduced to farce and personal entertainment rather than information handling purposes.

Stripping objective reality from society is what the social media was designed for. Conspirators (power mongering incompetents) control that sort of thing. (Describing the work of conspirators is not conspiracy theorizing, because their work is continuously visible for evaluating the evidence. Evidence evaluation is the opposite of conspiracy theorizing; it's how objective reality is increased through rationality.)

Consider how the social media works. People hit likes, and then they are sent additional material along those lines. That's how evidence is erased, not how evidence is acquired. Sending predetermine material based on values obliterates evidence based realities. It's how railroad jobs such as QAnon are produced.

Acquiring evidence requires personal effort to determine answers to the questions. Searching the internet used to serve that purpose. The power mongers were determined to prevent the internet from serving that purpose from the beginning. They did everything possible trying to get social critics off the internet. They failed and were replaced by Google, which made searching much easier, that is until Google was taken over by the power mongers and deteriorated into the same purposes of stripping information off the internet.

Google now throws major obstacles in the path of searching for information. First, the purpose shifted to selling products. Then the listing of web sites was prioritized for authoritative sources such as universities and bureaucracies. And now they cut off inquiries after several pages, so no one can dig deeper. On top of that, they now add several pages of kiddie questions to clutter and get in the way of searching.

The peripheral media used to create an alternative method of finding information. But it too was taken over by power mongers in their determination to strip objective reality from society. The peripherals now replace much of the verifiable information with audio and video which chew up too much time for serious persons and cannot be copied and pasted for exchange of information.

The end result is fascism based on farcical realities such as QAnon and the big lie that Trump had the election stolen from him.

Deteriorations in Science: Vox News Article, July 14, 2016

Smith, on Economy