“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.”

[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.

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.

MY OH MAYAN! — 2012 May Indeed Be The End Of The World As We Know It

The survivalists are running with this supposed ancient Mayan doomsday prophecy, of course. Playboy focused on the bunker-builders in a recent 2012 article. I spend more time with the New Agers, who are promising that 2012 will bring a planetary “evolution,” and explore the possibility that we’re really entering a new Dark Age of superstition.

My previous stories about the company, capped by this profile of founder Garrett Thornburg, have been compiled here.

WordPress won’t let me embed the file without shelling out more money, which makes me angry enough to think about not renewing my service. (Like they care.) Anyway, here’s a link to the MP3. It’s a later segment.

My Santa Fe Reporter story that led to the interview generated a lot of interest and, I hope, saved a few people from getting ripped off. (Here’s my follow-up on the results of the auction, which a couple of attendees made to sound piss-poor.)

Gilded cages: Even Santa Fe women of wealth and status get trapped by domestic violence

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Update: SFR has compiled all my domestic violence coverage on a single page, and given it a name: Behind Closed Doors. It’s the place to go if you feel like staring into the abyss for a while.