Radagast has compiled a list of offers of aid turned away by those with responsibility and power in managing homeland security, emergencies, and the like. You should scroll through it and read, I think.

I’ve wondered for some time how institutions make decisions. On the one hand, there is almost always somebody in charge in most modern institutions: a leader with a plan, or a committee empowered with oversight, and the vast majority of the decision-making power of the institution rests ultimately with those few. By the other argument, any institution of sufficient complexity must be e collective, and as such can be thought of as possessing a kind of unique and separate consciousness from that of any nominal leaders, and of “doing” things autonomously that are not explicit parts of any component person’s plans.

So on the one hand, a CEO or chief of some other sort sets the course of the institution and directs it, driving it towards explicit goals which are defined by committees and boards and constituents, but which in general that Big Boss person keeps in mind and uses to flavor every decision. In this sense, even very complex institutions are directed by individual will and choice, and while not driven as explicitly as a more straightforward and simple machine might be, an institution is nonetheless much like a complicated machine with a very difficult set of controls, with one responsible (a thoughtful planner) sitting before them twiddling the knobs.

On the other hand, institutions are real collectives of many people and overlapping component groups, undertaking projects and addressing concerns locally as each individual participant does some balanced combination of what they’re told and what their experience says is best to get their part of the work done. In this context, what we see as a collective “consciousness” of the institution emerges from the aggregate behavior of the people involved, and in a truly complex organization can be said to differ from and exceed the understanding of any one person’s actual vision or plan — including the nominal director or an outside observer. Organizations modeled in this way can present us with purposive-seeming behavior that does not sound like any part of the explicit plans of the individuals nominally in charge, but which rather sound like part of the “plan” of the institution itself. In this framework, institutions have intentions of their own, as well as desires and beliefs and all those other attributes of agents proper.

And you know what? Seen in either framework, FEMA and the current administration in the larger sense scare the hell out of me. There are three choices, I think: (1) They have planned or are now planning to act and respond in exactly this way, and so far everything is going according to plan or is a response to correct the plan of some central person in charge; (2) there is nobody in charge in any real sense, and this bureaucratic nightmare government that increasingly smacks of fascism is in fact driving itself, with us in its clutches, somewhere it wants to go; or (3) the institution is dead or somnolent, broken into pieces by neglect or intention, having been cut up or loose into to less-effectual independent components who do what they can with what they have, but are uncoordinated on all sides and levels.

Did I miss one?