How to use Power Point to destroy a society and delude yourself

...see the recently released Polo Step presentation, which is a series of completely delusional slides showing how the US would of course bring peace and prosperity to Iraq.

Yesterday, according to the BBC world service, Shi'a militants could not find a Sunni father, so they kidnapped his little boy, PUT OUT THE LITTLE BOY'S EYES, killed him, and dumped the body like so much garbage.

Delusional, comfortable men actually sat on their fat cans in briefing rooms, were served by gofers and flunkies with the best of everything, and PRETENDED that these slides, this pseudo-plan, meant something more than what it was: the daemonic decision that it was Okay to invade a member state of the United Nations and in so doing destroy a police force which, for all its faults, prevented the above from happening prior to March 2003, that (because the Power Point screen said so) today there would be a functioning Iraqi civil society in which the above little boy would be taken care of.

I've been there. I sat in meetings at Rainier Bank watching Power Point slides full of nonsense, nonsense which I was criticised for questioning, about Rainier's nonexistent ability to integrate its financial systems with any old rich-enough buyer who, the fat cats planned, would then destroy the livelihoods of Rainier employees not cool enough to matter.

We've been there. We've silently approved "plans" which we know will destroy our families with unpaid overtime and create at best systems that will make the rich richer and the poor, poorer.

"Power Point is just a tool". Well, yes, my Bell Northern Research co-workers Bob Gaskins and Whit Diffie invented its prototype, later sold to Microsoft, to get Northern Telecom's management off their backs and inform them of project status, because they know that elite managers won't read a goddamn thing and resent compound and complex sentences.

But no tool is "just" a tool. The United States is fulfilling Dijkstra's prediction that large organizations would eventually go tits up owing to the unmastered complexity of data systems.

And in so doing, it destroyed a flawed but functioning society in which little kids did not have THEIR EYES PUT OUT THEIR EYES PUT OUT THEIR EYES PUT OUT.