Rebecca Solnit lambasting the use of police/military force in #OWS and more broadly

They [police] represent those who have ruled this country since 9/11 in the name of our safety and security, while they made themselves, and no one else, safe and secure.  It is an order that has based itself on kidnapping, torture, secret prisons, illegal surveillance, assassination, permanent war, militarized solutions to every problem under the sun, its own set of failed occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the closest of relations with a series of crony capitalist corporations intent on making money off anyone’s suffering as long as the going is good.
via tomdispatch.com

Wow, Rebecca Solnit's (correction) Tom Engelhardt's words leading into Rebecca Solnit's piece are haunting and powerful, but more than anything scary and sad. As someone who has attended/organized/participated in many dozens of protests and demonstrations, I'm aghast at the overwhelming use of force to silence people. Yes, I know that Occupy Wall Street folks were breaking park rules by camping, but I cannot believe that in civil society we cannot find a better tool than pepper spray and billy clubs to resolve conflict.

The rest of Rebecca's post in TomDispatch is worth reading.

We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint

via nytimes.com

The New York Times put out We Have Met the Enemy and He is PowerPoint talking about how military commanders are spending inordinate amounts of time making and watching PowerPoint presentations. Anyone who knows me well knows I hate PowerPoints, usually because they're done so poorly. Now and then I've seen a great one, but there's something about the structure of the tool and the way in which we're teaching people to use it that drives me crazy.

I was struck by the fact that Bumiller (article author) missed referencing Edward Tufte's The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within, which is the best $7 you'll ever spend if you use PowerPoint or any other digital presentation tool. Tufte makes it clear how the tool itself can lead you to present data in unhelpful, and in NASA's case, dangerous, ways. I have an old blog post titled, Is PowerPoint a Waste of Time for Teachers that became relevant for me again after reading the Times' article.

Do you use PowerPoint? How do you differ from the military use? Do you use it with your students? How do you get them to learn what a bullet point even means? Too many questions, too little time.