The horns of a dilemma

[unixronin]

I'm baffled.

On the one hand, I find it difficult to conceive of this massive level of organized, concerted, bumbling incompetence taking place without those at the top of the command chain -- and here, the command chain goes from Michael Brown, Director of FEMA, to the Director of Homeland Security, to George Bush -- raising all kinds of holy hell to get effective action underway.  (Edit:  It's been observed that Brown's previous job was running the International Arabian Horse Association, which he ran into the ground and got fired from for it, then pumped it up on his resumé to make it sound like a more important and better-connected job than it really was.)  On the other hand, I find myself unable to conceive of any plausible hidden agenda -- be it financial or political -- that could lie behind the slowness and obstructiveness of the Gulf Coast hurricane disaster relief being intentional.  Surely any possible hoped-for political gain would be neutralized by the negative effect of the worldwide visibility of the complete incompetence our government has displayed.  It's disasters of this scale that the Department of Homeland Security was chartered to handle and prevent; you can't prevent a hurricane, but as far as handling response after the event, it looks as though you're better off not being protected at all than being protected by Homeland Security.  (As an aside, interdictor says it's very easy to tell the folks who joined Homeland Security out of a desire to protect and serve from those who joined to bully and intimidate people under the color of authority.)  The lesson of Homeland Security so far seems to be that the efficiency and effectiveness of any government agency fall in geometric proportion to its size, and when you put together a department as big as Homeland Security, its actual usefulness asymptotically approaches zero.

Something needs to change, and it needs to change soon; but I don't know whether America as it now is has the spirit and the determination left to go through its government from top to bottom and cut out all the deadwood.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Something else I'm having a hard time selling to some folks is the idea of independent standards agencies. In the aviation industry, most of the safety checking, both airplanes and pilots, is done by independent examiners, who are in turn licensed by FedGov.

I'm also having a hard time selling the idea of distributed credibility. But both of these ideas - the idea that as much of the current function of government as can be privatized should be. Not sure why that is... folks are getting institutionalized?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Perhaps use UL as an example?

"How much do you trust the FDA to tell you whether something is safe? ...OK. How about CBS or ABC? Remember the pickup trucks they blew up to show how they could catch fire on their own? Yeah. Now, how much do you trust UL to tell you whether something is safe?"

I believe TUV, the German standards body, is an independent body, too. And the British standards Institute, while it holds a charter from Parliament, operates entirely independently of it and Parliament does not, and cannot, tell it what to approve. The most, as I understand it, that Parliament can do is request that BSI study and develop a draft standard for something or other. The Snell Foundation that evaluates and certifies motorcycle helmets in the US is also an independent foundation. (DOT helmet standards, by contrast, are all but worthless.)