John Borwick’s blog

Today at the Fellowship, we discussed how we feel about reading soldiers’ names as part of our “Joys & Concerns.”

I think that, in addition to reading the soldiers’ names, we should read how the stock of various war-related companies is doing. For example, we should read the five-year returns on Halliburton, which to me looks like its stock price has risen 10-fold in the last five years.

Separately, (maybe it already exists but) I think there should be a “war”-index, which would work similar to the DJIA average works.  The “war” index would be a composite of various companies with at least a certain gross revenue from the government or government contractors, e.g. Boeing.

In reading some iPhone “news” articles from Google, I saw comments on several different pages about iPhailure.com AKA iphonemobilesolutions.com. All of this site’s comments about the iPhone are negative.

Well, a WHOIS lookup shows iPhailure.com, written by “Jordan Corning,” is owned by his company: “ITR Group, Inc.” The ITR Group web site says on the home page that they are a “management consulting and technology services company;” on their services page they say they offer “mobility solutions” to automate processes and “[b]y extending specific functionality to handheld computing devices like tablets, PDAs, or Smartphones.”

So, this group has a definite interest in Microsoft, they work a lot with portable devices and presumably make money consulting with portable devices, and they are spamming iPhone articles with FUD.

The tween-centered meat lobby mouthpiece, cool-2b-real, is still going strong. IMHO they’ve increased their emphasis on “be healthy: eat a lot of meat.”

Friday I watched Papillon, a 2hr15m reality-based movie about the prisons of French Guiana starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman.
My favorite quote of the movie is when Papillon is explaining to his wealthy fellow inmate that his fellow’s dependence on outside forces to help him get out of prison is misplaced, and in fact his willingness to defer–hoping that he will be freed–only plays into the guards’ hands. Papillon says, “Me, they can kill–you, they own.”
The other quote I like is from the “making of” special feature, when the real “Papillon” who actually went through the fourteen year ordeal says “society does not want free men; they want conditoned men–men who march in step.”
Dang!

Lauren, my momz, and I watched “Kiss Me, Kate“, a Cole Porter musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew.

Much of it was offensive to me. Cole Porter must have had some problems. Even though the show was a total of three hours long (with intermission), they had time to have women dance around pointlessly on stage for minutes at a time. One of the two female leads sings about how she cheats on her love but is “true in her own way”–and is portrayed in the play as despicable, impoverished woman. One of the male leads is a general who plans to subdue his woman to make her into his own image–and is one of the top men in the country, a guy you can really respect.

Despite my cringing throughout the play, I believe the ending is an affirmation that the female lead (Kate) got to choose how to live her life, and she chose to pursue her own interests rather than be subdued by the general. My mom OTOH believes this ending reinforces the gender stereotype of Kate as submissive woman.

Check out this neat chart that shows which major company owns which “small”-feeling organic company. For example, Coke owns Odwalla.

Last year I gave two one-hour talks on “appropriate technology” to some entering WFU students. They went pretty badly, because I treated them as lectures, and I was pretty sure I didn’t want to talk again.

Now, though, because of Derrick Jensen, I’m thinking if I get the chance next year I could give a talk along the lines of “why do you want to go to college?”

I just read Derrick Jensen’s Walking On Water, an indictment of Western Civilization’s educational system as a tool to create slaves for capitalism. The book’s principle vehicle is the story of Derrick teaching creative writing to university students and to prisoners. Through these stories Derrick analyzes how schools create commodities rather than creative, realized people, how classrooms and grades teach subservience to “higher authority” above self-reliance, and most interestingly for me Derrick analyzes whether he himself should be a teacher within the educational system and what students learn from his classes.

In light of Derrick’s stance as an anarcho-primitivist, it is awesome that I just blogged about his book.

update: The Memory Hole: The Educational System Was Designed to Keep Us Uneducated and Docile.

I’m trying out Amazon’s “wish list” function to keep track of books I want to read. Anyone, if you have a better tool for tracking books to read, please let me know. Anyways, I added Against Civilization: Readings and Reflections, and got the below recommendations:

• Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization
• Elements of Refusal
• Future Primitive & Other Essays
• The Culture of Make Believe
• Welcome to the Machine: Science, Surveillance, and the Culture of Control
• A Language Older Than Words
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
• High School Musical
• Apple 30 Gb iPod!!!

Three of these things are not like the others…

I’ve started reading Slow Leadership, a blog about how to reduce the pace of business without sacrificing productivity. I like some of the quotes from their recent survey:

I am not in any way empowered to fix the devastatingly inefficient systems that are currently in place. All I can do is look on in horror.