By Bill Van Auken

02 June, 2015

WSWS.org

With the US-led air war against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) now in its 10th month, the Islamist militia continues to make territorial gains in both countries, inflicting serious losses on the military in Iraq as well as both government forces and rival Islamist “rebels” in Syria.

In its latest attack on Monday, ISIS launched a devastating suicide bombing against an army base just north of the Iraqi city of Fallujah, killing at least 45 members of the security forces and wounding scores more.

The attack was carried out using an armored Humvee fighting vehicle loaded with explosives. The attack detonated ammunition in a base depot, setting off explosions that continued for several hours.

The increasing use of US-made Humvees in such bombing attacks is the byproduct of the debacle suffered by the Iraqi regime and its US-armed and trained security forces with the fall of Mosul to ISIS last June. Iraqi army and police units fled the city abandoning massive stockpiles of US arms and ammunition that fell into the hands of the Islamist militia.

The scale of this debacle was underscored on Sunday with the admission by Iraq’s Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi that “We lost 2,300 Humvees in Mosul alone.”

As an indication of the scale of this loss, the Guardian newspaper reported that the cost of 1,000 armored Humvees approved for sale to Iraq last year was estimated at $579 million.

A Queensland special school is shaking up how to teach mathematics in a bid to reverse poor rates of employment for people with disabilities.

Oscar Riondato, 8, has a multitude of health conditions including cerebral palsy, two holes in the heart and epilepsy which have led to a mild intellectual impairment.

The Goodna Special School student is taking part in the YuMi Deadly Maths Program which adopts a hands on, practical approach to teaching maths.

Queensland University of Technology's Dr Bronwyn Ewing is behind the program which has been running at the school for about 12 months.

"We know that historically mathematics hasn't been taught well," she said.

"There has been that tendency for it to be a traditional approach."

Dr Ewing said the program, which uses practical and physical methods to engage students, has rolled out to 12 Queensland special schools, with 48 teachers participating.

"It's very much starting with those contextualised experiences, those experiences that we all engage in from day to day," she said.

"What is known is that gaps in student learning of numeracy firmly manifests itself in the early years with students performing in the bottom 25 per cent in later grades."

Oscar's mother, Sylvia Riondato, said he was more enthusiastic and more willing to be involved.

"He is learning quickly," Ms Riondato said.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-06-08/math-program-to-help-children-with-a-disability-gain-employment/6519592

These are the little steps that help humankind's societies make giant leaps... read from top...

Note: Thiers' (15 April 1797 – 3 September 1877) haircut was invented in 2009....

The ancient Greeks were first to make the point. Shakespeare raised the prospect too. But Lord Byron was, perhaps, the most direct of them all: “We of the craft are all crazy,” he told the Countess of Blessington, casting a wary eye over his fellow poets.

The notion of the tortured artist is a stubborn meme. Creativity, it states, is fuelled by the demons that artists wrestle in their darkest hours. The idea is fanciful to many scientists. But a new study claims the link may be well-founded after all, and written into the twisted molecules of our DNA.

In a large study published on Monday, scientists in Iceland report that genetic factors that raise the risk of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia are found more often in people in creative professions. Painters, musicians, writers and dancers were, on average, 25% more likely to carry the gene variants than professions the scientists judged to be less creative, among which were farmers, manual labourers and salespeople.

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jun/08/new-study-claims-to-find-genetic-link-between-creativity-and-mental-illness

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All crazies... From an alien point of view, there are three major types of human of the species: the psychopaths, the mad and the sheep. Of course it's not all such black and white. The aliens would also notice we all carry the same typecasting stuff in different proportion. Some of us are more crazy than other. This Icelandic analysis confirmed by my personal sanity, exception to the rule, shows that all the other artists are nuts. They must be. Unless more nutty people choose the "artistic" craft, because they are not employable in disciplined activity such as accounting or can't be coaxed into cunning sheep to buy useless stuff? Or that they are too lazy to have a proper job?

More psychopaths will go into politics or become CEO of some big oiled company, for example and the "sheep" will eat and poop as required without challenging the dogs. If we were to do "society building" from scratch, we need to account for these three ingredients (psychos, mad, sheep) as when we mix eggs, flour and water on Masterchef to make a cake. If the proportions are not right, the cake will be either hard like a rock (or be an Anzac biscuit), crumbling like a ruined old castle, or runny like a crook quiche... Add booze (rum) to hard rock and you get a mediocre but passable Rum Baba. I think this is where we live.

Mind you, many of the psychopaths in power are also crazy. They paint a picture of social rubbish but, then, the sheep love it. It reminds them of time immemorial when they used to roam the paddock without dogs at their heels... But the dogs were always there except they did not have to do anything. The sheep ate and pooped as required. 

Perhaps because the alternative is too hideous to contemplate, we persuade ourselves that those who wield power know what they are doing. The belief in a guiding intelligence is hard to shake.

We know that our conditions of life are deteriorating. Most young people have little prospect of owning a home, or even of renting a decent one. Interesting jobs are sliced up, through digital Taylorism, into portions of meaningless drudgery. The natural world, whose wonders enhance our lives, and upon which our survival depends, is being rubbed out with horrible speed. Those to whom we look for guardianship, in government and among the economic elite, do not arrest this decline, they accelerate it.

The political system that delivers these outcomes is sustained by aspiration: the faith that if we try hard enough we could join the elite, even as living standards decline and social immobility becomes set almost in stone. But to what are we aspiring? A life that is better than our own, or worse?

Last week a note from an analyst at Barclays’ Global Power and Utilities group in New York was leaked. It addressed students about to begin a summer internship, and offered a glimpse of the toxic culture into which they are inducted.

“I wanted to introduce you to the 10 Power Commandments … For nine weeks you will live and die by these … We expect you to be the last ones to leave every night, no matter what … I recommend bringing a pillow to the office. It makes sleeping under your desk a lot more comfortable … the internship really is a nine-week commitment at the desk … an intern asked our staffer for a weekend off for a family reunion – he was told he could go. He was also asked to hand in his BlackBerry and pack up his desk … Play time is over and it’s time to buckle up.”

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/09/aspirational-parents-children-elite

This is a fully fledged schooling for psychopaths, for the god of cash..

The Federal Government has been accused of trying to prevent community legal centres from speaking out on behalf of vulnerable Australians who rely on their help.

The sector helps more than 250,000 people each year and campaigns for reform on issues ranging from Indigenous incarceration to domestic violence.

But some within the sector are worried about a "gag clause" contained in an agreement being developed between the federal and state governments.

The draft agreement, which will govern the way community legal centres operate, states Commonwealth funding should not be used to lobby governments or to engage in public campaigns.

That would threaten a large part of the work that community legal centres do, Liana Buchanan from Victoria's Federation of Community Legal Centres said.

"It's a gag clause that will say that community legal centres can work every day with vulnerable and disadvantaged people, but they're not allowed to talk about it and you're certainly not allowed to talk about it with media or with politicians," she said.

Ms Buchanan said centres could lose funding if they failed to comply with the agreement, which would prohibit her from commenting for stories, such as this one.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-06-12/community-legal-centres-fear-being-silenced-by-gag-clause/6543148

This is outrageous. Read article at top... 

By attacking the institutions of redistribution, closing down democratic debate wherever possible, and demonising his political opponents, the Prime Minister is leading an assault on Australia's commitment to fairness, writes Tim Dunlop.

The Abbott Government's game plan for the nation is pretty obvious by now: it is a three-pronged attack on what we might call Egalitarian Australia.

Egalitarian Australia can be defined as the idea that government has a role in managing the risks associated with the inevitable problems that arise in a globalised, capitalist economy.

Such an economy is brilliant at producing goods and services at the lowest possible price and satisfying the material needs of that part of the population which can afford to pay the market price for them.

But the principle underpinning Egalitarian Australia is that a nation is not just an economy. Markets, for all their brilliance, do not always work, are not always applicable, and do not in and of themselves have anything to say about equality. Government therefore has a role in doing what markets can't.

The pillars of this approach are universal healthcare, equitable access to education, a wages system that protects the rights of workers against the (generally) more powerful claims of capital, and a secure retirement.

Of course, not everyone has accepted the premise of Egalitarian Australia, but it has been remarkably resilient, being broadly endorsed across parties of the left and right.

But this is where the Abbott Government is qualitatively different, even from previous rightwing governments. This Government does not accept the premise of Egalitarian Australia and from day one has sought to destroy it.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-07-16/dunlop-a-strategy-to-end-egalitarian-australia/6624180

According to this old receipt, the copy of my book mentioned at top, The Palace of Architecture, was bough in South Africa by Dr Fairbridge. I guess this was the grandfather of Kingsley Ogilvie Fairbridge (1885-1924). Kingsley was an "imperialist and idealist, born on 2 May 1885 at Grahamstown, South Africa, son of Rhys Seymour Fairbridge, mining engineer and land surveyor, and his wife Rosalie Helen, née Ogilvie.

His great-grandfather Dr James William Fairbridge, in 1824 in Capetown, had helped set up a Children's Friend Society. Kingsley briefly attended St Andrew's College before, at 11, he moved with the family to Mashonaland, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). He suffered severe malaria and at 12 had the vision that he would like to bring farmers to this fertile but empty land—it was reinforced by his exposure to the slums of England in 1902. He educated himself and went as a Rhodes scholar to Oxford in 1908.

He was awarded a diploma in forestry at Exeter College (1911) and a boxing blue as a middleweight. Next year with friends he formed the Child Emigration Society (later Fairbridge Society). He planned to initiate a series of farm schools for orphaned and underprivileged children, which would relieve overcrowded English slums and, within an agricultural setting, provide training in the underpopulated areas of the world. He chose Western Australia for his first experiment and on 14 December 1911 married Ruby Ethel Whitmore, who had some nursing training, at Felbridge, Surrey.

They arrived in Perth next year with idealism but little financial expertise or practical agricultural knowledge. They acquired a small mixed farm near Pinjarra where they built accommodation, initially in tents, for the first thirty-five orphans who arrived in 1913. World War I stopped further migration and dried up most of the society's funds. The State government helped with a subsidy and in 1919 the Fairbridges went to England where he raised the money for a 3000-acre (1214 ha) uncleared property north-east of Pinjarra. Next year this farm was laid out and separate cottages built for the boys and girls, each family-sized group with its own garden, designed to avoid an institutionalized approach. The government belatedly provided a formal school, and by 1924 there were 200 children being educated, gradually raised to 400.

The struggle had been justified and the farm school was a success. But the founder, weakened by malaria, died of lymphatic tumour in Perth on 19 July 1924 and was buried at his school. He was survived by his wife (d.1966), two daughters and two sons who all returned to England. The farm school continued under a principal. While Fairbridge's orphans were undeniably given a happy, kindly start in life, for various reasons their training was inadequate and led to their being fitted for only a range of semi-skilled occupations. Lack of finance always limited the founder's dream of 'Great Colleges of Agriculture' and the final result hardly reduced either Britain's over-population or increased Australia's sparse inland settlement.

He wrote Veldt Verse (1909) and an autobiography which was published in 1927. The story of the farm school, Pinjarra, was published by his widow in 1937. A painting of Fairbridge hangs in Rhodes House, Oxford, and there is a statue of him as a boy at Christmas Pass, Umtali, Zimbabwe. The society expanded the farm schools, with branches in other Australian States and Canada. But by the 1970s only the original school survived. An important part of the society activity became the provision of Fairbridge scholarships for British students to Commonwealth universities.

Read more:

http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/fairbridge-kingsley-ogilvie-6132

Read from top.

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