This week, I have been mostly reading:

• “I found myself turning into an idiot!”: David Graeber explains the life-sapping reality of bureaucratic life
• Unemployment Not Due to Lack of Motivation - Xavier Smerdon, Pro Bono Australia: "You cannot punish people out of poverty"
• Iran and America’s Memory Hole - Dr. Arnold J. Oliver at Informed comment: As Doonesbury put it at the time of the revolution, "The Shah? What Shah?"
• Slandering the 70s - Paul Krugman, New York Times
• The Important Things Standardized Tests Don't Measure - Marion Brady at WaPo: "[R]eal learning is natural and inherently satisfying."
• The Higher Ed Disruptors Are Still With Us - Eric Loomis at Lawyers, Guns & Money: "This is classic Shock Doctrine. Underfund the universities, make people believe that they can’t provide a proper service, replace them with private companies, and then profit."
• Metaphor alert on data: should it be anyone’s property? - Nicholas Gruen, On Line Opinion
• Militarism and the myths of Anzac -  Anonymous Trot at Solidarity.net.au: "As historian Joan Beaumont said last year: 'The emphasis on Gallipoli and the Anzac legend has really been part of our political culture. It is not part of history.'"
• Underperforming nursing students 'could endanger public safety', say university academics - Linton Besser, Peter Cronau and Hagar Cohen for ABCs Four Corners: "Academics are confronted by a rising tide of student appeals for higher marks. As an increasing portion of them are part-time casual teachers, working through a series of 12-week, single-semester contracts, there is a reluctance to fail students as teachers said the work required to manage appeals was effectively unpaid."
• Tony Abbott And His Amazing Take On Invisibility - world-class snark from Richard Hil at New Matilda: "The ETS, he announced with Aristotelian hubris, is 'a so-called market in the non-delivery of an invisible substance to no-one.' Flushed with self-importance, Abbott gazed into the distance, as if he had just delivered the rhetorical equivalent of the Gettysburg address. Journalists gazed back and forth in bemusement, trying to figure out if this was indeed another gaffe, or a memorable utterance destined for a place in Brainy Quote."