I’ve been following the various social media over the last week, reading and watching various reports of how local volunteer efforts are handling disaster recovery in the mountainous areas blasted by Hurricane Helene. FEMA and various other federal departments are helping – sort of – or hindering, interfering, preventing access or flat-out confiscating donations, according to some rather irate reports, which reports are indignantly condemned as rumors by all the established media sources and FEMA’s own public affairs representatives. No smoke without a fire, as the saying goes, and hacks – err, that is “reporters” for the established media certainly don’t appear to be venturing deep into the Appalachian weeds to report on such matters first-hand. Although, recalling the dog’s breakfast that the national establishment media made of covering Hurricane Katrina, that might be all to the good in the long run.
At any rate, FEMA, like so many other government organizations, corporations, and universities seems of late to have slavishly follow the dictates of Diversity-Inclusion-Equity (DIE as we call it in conservative/libertarian circles). FEMA, after taking care of illegal immigrants, would prefer focusing on service to the D-I-E client base instead of those who are … you know, impacted by the disaster regardless of race, sexual orientation, religion or income. In any case, FEMA as an organization seems to be of less and less use, compared to local volunteers, churches, organizations like the Redneck Air Force, the Cajun Navy and those states, like Florida, whose disaster-recovery offices are so well-practiced at coping with hurricane activity and the aftermath that they can actually locate their posteriors without the aid of a large-scale map, PowerPoint flip charts and GPS.
In any case, I speculate that the various devotees of DIE in various orgs and corporations are writing their own corporate/activity death sentence, sooner or later. (Probably later, in the case of government bodies, as civil service hires tend to dig into the body politic like ticks and not easily dislodged.) In any case, competence at the core activity is bread and butter, when it comes to that bottom line. “Do or not do”, as the weird greenish Jedi master admonished Luke Skywalker. Base the hiring and promotion decisions on the race, sex, or orientation of the hired/promoted, and put actual competence at the job at a distant second? “Not do” appears to be the assured result.
I will admit that perhaps the DIE checkboxers might on random occasion turn up a previously unconsidered racial or sexual minority capable of performing at a high level required for optimal performance results. And I may score a hot date with the Pride and Prejudice era Colin Firth or have a Hollywood producer option one of my books for a blockbuster movie. I believe the odds are about the same.
It’s a bit more complicated when it comes to government services. But when individuals are hired or recruited for an organization/activity based on superficial aspects such as their color or sexual orientation and NOT their core competencies … the organization/activity can skate along for a while, based on the labor that the remaining competent staff provide. Eventually those able and dedicated will burn out, retire and depart, leaving the activity in the same situation as the human appendix – useless, purposeless and inclined to nasty inflammation. At some point when “do” is not delivered in a commercial setting, the purchasers of a service walk away, taking their eyeballs and discretionary dollars elsewhere. Look at what’s been happening with movies and TV miniseries in the woke era; the competent and experienced writers, producers, directors who can work up and tell a good story translated to the big or smaller screen that will pack them in are basically sidelined in favor of the wokerati, with results that give the Critical Drinker hours of materiel.
Discuss as you will. Be as amusing as anything on Netflix or at the multiplex of late.
I had the always assumed that FEMA’s new strategy, you know 21st Century touchy-feely management, was that they best way to help victims of disasters was to become a disaster of an agency
As far as TV shows….
I had been following the growth and impact of private equity in sports. The reason for both the growth in supply and demand for PE lies in the enormous jump in revenue in sports and in the resulting growth in franchise valuations, basically the median NFL team value just shy of 6.1 billion and there aren’t too many individuals with that sort of cash around.
For the NFL, that big jump in revenue has come from TV deals. Why? About ½ of the top-100 most watched prime time TV shows in 2023 were NFL broadcasts…. and a good percentage of the remaining shows were other sports, news (60 Minutes) or awards.
Note this doesn’t include streaming services, but you get an idea of where the eyeballs are headed and therefore the money. Sports are guaranteed viewers which means show development is going to be starved in favor of rights fees.
I’m sure there are still going to be woke, big-dollar vanity projects, especially for streamers, but there’s only so much money to pay. The only good news is that for the time being all the major sports leagues have locked into their TV contracts, so there’s some room for show development. However I would expect more and more sports programming to be picked up by streaming services, sort of like what happened to Amazon in 2023.
So if you are Kathleen Kennedy with the dead husk of the Star Wars franchise, you are going to be competing for every marginal development dollar within Disney against ESPN and ABS Sports rights fees. FAFO
It has been my experience that with very, very few exceptions, competence on the part of a government agency – any government agency, at any level of government – is entirely a random event. And, of late, it has become substantially more random and just as substantially less frequent.
Government is a “process driven” operation, not a “results driven” one; most of the time a barely marginal success rate at its assigned tasks that would drive a private sector organization into bankruptcy and oblivion within months will allow perpetual existence of that agency. No one expects any different, and for some reason, Americans willingly tolerate such dismal performance.
Only when events force some agency to emerge from its protective bureaucratic cocoon iinto the public’s awareness does the incompetence become too visible to be ignored; Welcome to North Carolina, as the roadside signs say.
Unfortunately, what we jokingly refer to as “media” is of little worth in improving the situation. Media’s mission is to provide cover and protection for the incompetence because both endeavors share the same foundational beliefs and are inextricably joined at the hip, the only question being “which way are they facing.” In the case of western North Carolina, that area of the country is barely hospitable terrain on the best of days – narrow winding roads, poor landmarks requiring local knowledge to navigate, fiercely independent residents somewhat inhospitable to outside visitors – one doesn’t establish a deeply wooded homestead 15 miles up and around a mountain on an asphalt cowpath because one seeks constant companionship – and there are no five star hotels or Michelin-rated restaurants at which the media glitterati can bask in each other’s adulation.
The Redneck Air Force, the Cajun Navy et al excel at dealing with those conditions because their members have Been There And Done That, whether by growing up in a similar environment or experiencing it when serving in the military. Sweaty, sleepless and showerless for days, not just dealing with hardship but driven to overcome it no matter what, is a way of life for them. They know no other because the standard they set for themselves allows no compromise.
They are Americans, in every sense of the word and deserve every bit of the awe with which the world has always viewed them.
Needless to say, faced with a raw, unairconditioned environment without flush toilets and plentiful coffee makers and snacks, bureaucrats tend to withdraw into their protective shells when it becomes something other than “a well-catered school field trip.” Their process-driven operations stall and flounder in the face of even slight, and very minor, adversity and disruption because the operational plan has no way of accommodating variance from “normal” even though “very much not normal” is the foundational mission of their organization. Blocks must be checked, blanks filled in appropriately, forms completed neatly and in proper order or the entire thing grinds to a halt. “Impromptu” and “ad hoc” are not only not in their lexicon, they are cause for avoidance and revulsion. “How can we get relief trucks up these roads” they ask, looking at drone pictures of where a barely adequate road used to be. Drone pictures – which took four days to arrange – not direct viewing, because the agency manual carefully assembled by the mavens of Human Resources prescribes avoidance of the potential hazards incipient in hiking up to actually look at the real situation, not to mention what the mud might do to those $300 L.L. Bean boots and designer jeans.
Private helicopters, when not grounded by bureaucrats, show them how supplies get delivered and the injured evacuated, into locations with barely two feet of rotor clearance because that’s all they had in the Afgan mountains or southeast Asian jungles where their craft was honed. When a privately funded – and trained – mule train from the 1880s cavalry days arrives and demonstrates success delivering supplies to the inaccessible the bureaucrats should just pack up and leave, except they have to do something they can talk about when the eventual Congressional hearings demand their presence.
Ronald Reagan once said “No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size” and “a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth!”
Some government is necessary for an orderly, civilized society; at point is “just how much government, to serve whom, and to what degree of involvement and accountability” we must face. What we have now clearly is not working the way it should for We The People.
Robert Conquest – The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
I use that quote quite a bit. But there is one Mitch Strand Original I use, too, or at least I heard it first in my own head:
“You can’t fund- raise on Mission Accomplished.”
Charities can’t say, “Okay, we’re done! Shut it down!” Not when pensions are involved. And if a bureaucracy actually solves a problem, how on Earth can they justify their budget for the next fiscal year?”
Bureaucracies only response to the actual progress of the human race is, and must be, mission creep.
I have to laugh about the timing of the comments regarding bureaucracy because I have been stuck all morning on Zoom calls with HR.
Franklin brings up the great point about process. I have certain amount (just a little) of sympathy for people who work in bureaucracies because 1) they have the difficult task of translating priorities/dictates/goals into actual procedures 2) they need to create said procedures so that are accepted as “fair” by everyone. It is a very difficult task and becomes even harder the larger the organization or political unit. It’s not just government, I worked for a Fortune 500 company and the red tape was immense. I set up my own orientation program to increase retention and I had to organize it like a secret operation to hide it from HR.
The problem about a “fair process” is that the more the Left asks people to associate with the larger society through their identity, “diversity”, the more “bureaucratic” the process. Anything less than exact application of the rules for one person and not another, if they are of different identities, can be seen as a violation and discrimination. So you CYA. Common sense, by definition, is not the guiding principle of bureaucracy. Also, good luck getting bureaucracies to work together. Nobody gets promoted because they got their agency to work with another.
So yes we have the normal self-dealing aggrandizement by bureaucrats. We also have the capture of special interests; look how environmental groups and union hiring laws have run the rural Internet and electric car charging programs into the ground. Big surprise. However even if you correct all of that you will still have run into the very fact that bureaucracy, by its nature is toxic. Reinventing government schemes are not going to work
It works better in places France, Japan, or Germany because you have a more common culture so things do not need to spelled out to that degree, there is more :common sense” in pursuing more efficient solutions.
The important bureaucracies – Defense, FEMA- I don”t how you work it. Defense has been a mess since forever, though you can make an impact… for a while. FEMA? The basic emergency function seems to work well at the state level; maybe the best you can hope for is to push as much to that level and have someone crack heads to get everyone to work together at the national (hello VP Vance)
Of all the women who were stranded and endangered in flood ravaged mountains, how many had their lives saved by a bear?
Bureaucracy and red tape…a CEO of my acquaintance spoke of the need to ‘play whack-a-mole’ against incipient outbreaks of bureaucracy.
But no, it’s worse.
A long time ago before the internet I used to read books for fun. It was a crazy time, I know.
A lot of those books were about such topics as why the West was successful, etc.
One reason was because it wasn’t beholden to endless bureaucracies stuffed full of well-paid bureaucrats wearing the equivalent of those $300 L.L. Bean boots that aren’t to be mussed. I recall especially that Victor Davis Hanson noted that welders were turned loose on the USS Yorktown after it returned to Pearl Harbor after Coral Sea, enabling them to fix that ship well enough to fight at Midway.
Lately we see FEMA bureaucrats actively impeding the efforts of volunteers to save lives. The Red Cross is seizing donated supplies, because reasons. The regime is threatening to arrest private helicopter pilots because they haven’t been given permission to save people, because crazy.
Anyone want to suggest that if Martha’s Vineyard was hit by a bad storm and had power knocked out, the regime would be arresting the helicopter pilots bringing them fresh arugula?
Anyway, this has crossed a line. It’s one thing to watch someone drown because you’re too far away to help or simply don’t care, it’s quite another to grab them by the neck and hold them underwater until they die.
Western Civilization is being destroyed because there is a parasitical ruling class that is making stupid decisions that affect everyone, because somehow these idiots have managed to arrange it such that they have that much power, which contravenes the very thing made the West successful- individual freedom.
In other words, if the West was still on a path to remaining successful, the regime wouldn’t have any sort of power to stop people from saving lives in North Carolina. And it wouldn’t be able to force people to maintain an HR bureaucracy of any sort, let alone one that gets to pick who should be hired or fired.
Either this will change or Western Civilization will end.
Excellent advice – I cross-posted at Liberty’s Torch.
https://www.libertystorch.info/2024/10/16/why-government-efforts-fail/
I opine that there’s no such thing as an “important bureaucracy.”