pinecore

The More You Know: Radical Redistribution

In Cheer, Domestic on February 3, 2010 at 4:44 pm

This is my favorite quote from radical economist Sam Bowles, profiled here.

“Being willing to sit in a boring classroom for 12 years, and then sign up for four more years and then sign up for three or more years after that—well, that’s a pretty good measure of your willingness to essentially do what you’re told.”

Stay in school—or not. You heard it here first, kids!

This article also features my latest iMovie experiment. Scroll to the bottom if you prefer pictures to words.

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Thanks for the pickup: Marginal Revolution, Baseline Scenario, Economist’s View, Crooked Timber, Hacker News, &c.,  &c., &c., & “my head exploded.”

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Wi-Fi Woo-Woo Goes To Court

In Domestic, Fear, Foreign on January 13, 2010 at 9:44 am

This story, which I broke online last week and followed up in the print edition of SFR, has gotten a bit of play, not only in Santa Fe, but in the UK, Australia, Germany and Hungary.

[Arthur] Firstenberg previously drew notice when he organized other “electrosensitive” citizens to campaign against Wi-Fi in public buildings. Last year, he added digital television to the list of offending technologies.

Now, he wants a judge to ban [his neighbor Raphaela] Monribot from using her phone or computer. Firstenberg’s monetary demand includes $100,000 for pain and suffering; he writes that he has endured “great discomfort” by sleeping in his car this winter.

“I think you’ll find the complaint of most iPhone users in Santa Fe is that they don’t travel through adobe walls,” Christopher Graeser, Monribot’s attorney and an iPhone user as well, tells SFR.

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Warrior Life? Not Quite

In Domestic, Fear on December 17, 2009 at 12:15 pm

The latest installment in my better-part-of-a-year-long series on domestic violence is out now—and, apparently, being stolen by the stackful from Santa Fe newsstands.

This chapter focuses on the so-called “fathers’ rights” movement, and goes in depth on the case of a wealthy local executive and Tea Party organizer who allegedly threatened his wife with a knife and “waterboarded” (in the wife’s words) their 2-year-old daughter. This was only the latest in a series of abuse allegations against the man, Josh Gonze, whose public advocacy work may have helped change the state child support law in favor of wealthy men such as himself.

Gonze is affiliated with more moderate, secular men’s groups. But his lawyer, David Standridge, seems to be a full-on Christian Patriarch. He writes in praise of “violent men who take the kingdom of God by force…men who are tired of the perversion, rudeness and slothfulness of [sic] as dictated by today’s culture.”

There’s also a thread in here about how the local daily dropped the ball in spotting an astroturf campaign, with serious consequences. Too bizarre. Read the story here. And read my previous domestic violence coverage in SFR here.

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