I don't know if I can condone inflicting fear on personal electronics, but nuking the drive is simple enough, and a painless operation.
Top-secret-clearance route: remove the drive; put it through an industrial shredder; replace it with a new one.
The way that's probably good enough so long as the feds aren't involved: burn yourself a copy of the Ultimate Boot CD. Any of the disk wiping tools on there will do the trick, but 'Derik's Boot and Nuke' has a handy automatic mode which will securely wipe every hard disk connected to the computer; that's probably the easiest one to get going. It'll probably take a couple hours.
Something Awful Forums. It costs a once off $10 to be useful but is amazing at keeping out ~~redditors~~ trolls because you can still get banned.
The Awl/The Hairpin/The Toast have decent communities
Well, this is my pinterest account. (some of them are a little NSFW) The best approach for me is to just search for a topic I like under 'boards' and follow them. The default front page of pinterest is boring but my front page is full of video games, design and humor.
Khan Academy has a lot of videos on economics. I haven't personally watched them, but Khan Academy has proved to be a good starting point for many different areas.
If you want a text book you can usually find cheap econ textbooks at a thrift store.
I'm not sure of any less academic, easier to digest sources of information on classical economic theory, but I'm sure they're out there somewhere.