Over at The Marietta Times (not to be confused with Not The Marietta Times) the conversation is all but over. I just took a peak and there are two, count them two, polls (and no articles) in the What’s Hot box: How interested are you in seeing so-called faith-based movies? (three comments, one each from LovesBuckeyes, chugger and flintnapper) and How often do you skip breakfast? (two comments, one each from ea333555 and LovesBuckeyes).

In the weeks leading up to the paywall around the Marietta Times, there were articles and polls that ran for dozens, if not hundreds, of comments. Granted, many of those comments were unenlightening, but still, readers were engaged.

In the Forums, the Latest Topics and Most Popular Topics sections, the vitality is even lower. The most popular topic: Union fat-cats…myth or reality? was last commented on 25 days ago and the latest topic: Barack Obama Legacy has devolved to the point that even John Wayne would have left the mud pit and walked away (as an aside, I love the sponsor of this clip).

Here’s my prediction: by the end of 2014 the Marietta Times will realize that the income (most likely the only standard of measurement that the folks at Ogden care about) from the web presence simply doesn’t cover costs and the decision will be made to shutter the online wing of the paper.

I noted yesterday, a transcript of Noam Chomsky’s speech to a gathering of members and allies of the Adjunct Faculty Association of the United Steelworkers in Pittsburgh, Penn. The 1 percent are bent on ruling by fear. We see it everywhere and all the time. Sometimes the only response to fear is to slay the dragon.

Noam Chomsky wrote:

“Flexibility” is a term that’s very familiar to workers in industry. Part of what’s called “labor reform” is to make labor more “flexible,” make it easier to hire and fire people. That’s, again, a way to ensure maximization of profit and control. “Flexibility” is supposed to be a good thing, like “greater worker insecurity.” Putting aside industry where the same is true, in universities there’s no justification.

So take a case where there’s under-enrollment somewhere. That’s not a big problem. One of my daughters teaches at a university; she just called me the other night and told me that her teaching load is being shifted because one of the courses that was being offered was under-enrolled. Okay, the world didn’t come to an end, they just shifted around the teaching arrangements-you teach a different course, or an extra section, or something like that. People don’t have to be thrown out or be insecure because of the variation in the number of students enrolling in courses. There are all sorts of ways of adjusting for that variation.

The idea that labor should meet the conditions of “flexibility” is just another standard technique of control and domination. Why not say that administrators should be thrown out if there’s nothing for them to do that semester, or trustees-what do they have to be there for? The situation is the same with top management in industry: if labor has to be flexible, how about management? Most of them are pretty useless or even harmful anyway, so let’s get rid of them.

On models of education, he continues:

One image of education was that it should be like a vessel that is filled with, say, water. That’s what we call these days “teaching to test”: you pour water into the vessel and then the vessel returns the water. But it’s a pretty leaky vessel, as all of us who went through school experienced, since you could memorize something for an exam that you had no interest in to pass an exam and a week later you forgot what the course was about. The vessel model these days is called “no child left behind,” “teaching to test,” “race to top,” whatever the name may be, and similar things in universities. Enlightenment thinkers opposed that model.

The other model was described as laying out a string along which the student progresses in his or her own way under his or her own initiative, maybe moving the string, maybe deciding to go somewhere else, maybe raising questions. Laying out the string means imposing some degree of structure. So an educational program, whatever it may be, a course on physics or something, isn’t going to be just anything goes; it has a certain structure.

But the goal of it is for the student to acquire the capacity to inquire, to create, to innovate, to challenge-that’s education. One world-famous physicist, in his freshman courses if he was asked “what are we going to cover this semester?” his answer was “it doesn’t matter what we cover, it matters what you discover.” You have gain the capacity and the self-confidence for that matter to challenge and create and innovate, and that way you learn; that way you’ve internalized the material and you can go on. It’s not a matter of accumulating some fixed array of facts which then you can write down on a test and forget about tomorrow.

This very situation arose two weeks ago in one of the schools where I work. Fifty years ago there would have been no discussion. In 2014 there was a discussion and the situation was redressed, but change does not happen until people stand up and declare “No. Not here, not now. Not while I live!”

What’s going on here…

Today’s headlines include:

Local News

Small & historic
Forum gathers area views on public schools
Safety campaigns aimed at motorists and motorcyclists
WCCC student excels in welding
Life of crime, addiction

Top Headlines Poll: Who do you think makes more driving mistakes: car/truck drivers or motorcyclists?

Previously…

Mano Singham writes:

Another factor is that competition for students has resulted in universities spending a lot on enhanced residential, dining, and recreational facilities, all of which cost a lot to build and maintain.

Mano is riffing on a speech given by Noam Chomsky titled: The Death of American Universities. I’m reading it now.

Chomsky wrote:

[T]here are other aspects which are also quite familiar from private industry, namely a large increase in layers of administration and bureaucracy. If you have to control people, you have to have an administrative force that does it. So in US industry even more than elsewhere, there’s layer after layer of management — a kind of economic waste, but useful for control and domination.

And the same is true in universities. In the past thirty or forty years, there’s been a very sharp increase in the proportion of administrators to faculty and students; faculty and students levels have stayed fairly level relative to one another, but the proportion of administrators have gone way up.

From Brain Pickings…

MOYERS: Do you think we can educate ourselves, that any one of us, at any time, can be educated in any subject that strikes our fancy?

ASIMOV: The key words here are “that strikes our fancy.” There are some things that simply don’t strike my fancy, and I doubt that I can force myself to be educated in them. On the other hand, when there’s a subject I’m ferociously interested in, then it is easy for me to learn about it. I take it in gladly and cheerfully…

[What’s exciting is] the actual process of broadening yourself, of knowing there’s now a little extra facet of the universe you know about and can think about and can understand. It seems to me that when it’s time to die, there would be a certain pleasure in thinking that you had utilized your life well, learned as much as you could, gathered in as much as possible of the universe, and enjoyed it. There’s only this one universe and only this one lifetime to try to grasp it. And while it is inconceivable that anyone can grasp more than a tiny portion of it, at least you can do that much. What a tragedy just to pass through and get nothing out of it.

What’s going on here…

Today’s headlines include:

Local News

Pets for Easter
Burglar/thief says he’s ‘the fall guy’
7th, Pike bid above estimate; project still a ‘go’
Food pantry’s new director a dietitian
Hands-on Earth Day activities made for families

Top Headlines Poll: How often do you skip breakfast?

Previously…

Photos by Mary Jo Hanlon…

200 years ago today, in North Wales, my great, great grandfather Thomas Evans was born.

Iechyd da!

I have no idea if any of my Welsh ancestors or living relations ever served in the South Wales Borders or the Welsh Guards but since I first saw Zulu in California back in 1978, I have been fascinated with this scene. The tradition, of course, continues.

I think that the conversation, regardless of any rancor, venom or bile that may be spewed, in important because we build our communities with our conversations and if we shut down the conversations because a few trolls haven’t left the playground, then we endanger the social health of the community.

A choke hold on comments lead me to create Not The Marietta Times two weeks ago and, while the only a handful of individuals have chosen to join the experiment, I’m pleased with the results at present. Larger venues, such as The Chicago Smut Sun Times and The Guardian, however, are not so positive.

Craig Newman writes:

The world of Internet commenting offers a marvelous opportunity for discussion and the exchange of ideas. But as anyone who has ever ventured into a comment thread can attest, these forums too often turn into a morass of negativity, racism, hate speech and general trollish behaviors that detract from the content.

In fact, the general tone and demeanor is one of the chief criticisms we hear in regard to the usability and quality of our websites and articles. Not only have we heard your criticisms, but we often find ourselves as frustrated as our readers are with the tone and quality of commentary on our pages.

From The Guardian:

We want to know if you would defend below-the-line (BTL) discussion. What positive things have you seen as a result of internet commentary? Would you agree with the Sun-Times that comments are all too often negative and trollish, or do you belong to strong and productive online communities? Has anyone online ever made your offline life better? Tell us about the merits or otherwise of BTL commenting and share your stories of how online debate has changed your life.

I adhere to Sturgeon’s Law: Ninety percent of everything is crap. (Yes, that does include my own work. That’s why all good writing is rewriting.) I’m willing to plow through the crap to find the diamonds.

I have a new favorite Forever Stamp.

From this morning’s The Guardian:

The Guardian and the Washington Post have been awarded the highest accolade in US journalism, winning the Pulitzer prize for public service for their groundbreaking articles on the National Security Agency’s surveillance activities based on the leaks of Edward Snowden.

The award, announced in New York on Monday, comes 10 months after the Guardian published the first report based on the leaks from Snowden, revealing the agency’s bulk collection of US citizens’ phone records.

In the series of articles that ensued, teams of journalists at the Guardian and the Washington Post published the most substantial disclosures of US government secrets since the Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam war in 1971.

The Pulitzer committee praised the Guardian for its “revelation of widespread secret surveillance by the National Security Agency, helping through aggressive reporting to spark a debate about the relationship between the government and the public over issues of security and privacy”.

Snowden, in a statement, said: “Today’s decision is a vindication for everyone who believes that the public has a role in government. We owe it to the efforts of the brave reporters and their colleagues who kept working in the face of extraordinary intimidation, including the forced destruction of journalistic materials, the inappropriate use of terrorism laws, and so many other means of pressure to get them to stop what the world now recognises was work of vital public importance.”

First, congratulations to both The Guardian and the Washington Post. The Guardian has been my daily newspaper for a few years now. Second, while Glenn Greenwald is mentioned in the story–

At the Guardian, the NSA reporting was led by Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill and film-maker Laura Poitras, and at the Washington Post by Barton Gellman, who also co-operated with Poitras. All four journalists were honoured with a George Polk journalism award last week for their work on the NSA story.

–I find it odd that only Snowden is quoted.

Curiouser and curiouser.

[Update at 0732: So, this story is beginning to spin off into Never Never land. I was working on an unrelated bit just now and had call to reference Eric Blair’s Bugaboo and that gave me pause as I remembered John Cook’s odd choice of art to illustrate his letter yesterday. I think I need more coffee.]

Glenn Greenwald last posted to The//Intercept on 4 April. After that, nothing. From no one.

Then yesterday John Cook posted a Passover Greeting From The Editor with a very odd and un-Passover graphic (Beta? Really?). What is going on here?

Cook wrote:

Hello. My name is John Cook, and as of three weeks ago I became the editor-in-chief of The Intercept. Since then, we haven’t published much material on the site, and that’s been on purpose. I’d like to take a moment to catch interested readers up on where we are and what you can expect from us over the coming weeks and months.

The site launched in February with an announcement from co-founders Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Jeremy Scahill that The Intercept was coming online with an initial short-term focus on stories about the operations of the National Security Agency, based in large part on an archive of documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The decision to begin publishing at that point was based on a commitment to continue the work of reporting on, publishing, and explicating those documents. It was not based on an assessment that everything that one needs for the successful launch of a news web site–staff, editorial capacity, and answers to questions about the site’s broader focus, operational strategy, structure, and design–had been worked out.

Those things still have not been worked out, and over the past three weeks I have begun the process of resolving them in collaboration with the remarkably talented team that has already been assembled here. Until we have completed the work of getting staffed up and conceptually prepared for the launch of a full-bore news operation that will be producing a steady stream of shit-kicking stories, The Intercept will be narrowly focusing on one thing and one thing only: Reporting out stories from the NSA archive as quickly and responsibly as is practicable. We will do so at a tempo that suits the material. When we are prepared to publish those stories, we will publish them. When we are not, we will be silent for a time, unless Glenn Greenwald has some blogging he wants to do, because no one can stop Glenn Greenwald from blogging.

As someone who has been the editor of national magazines, I’m gobsmacked. In particular, I find the language in the final sentences of both the second and third paragraphs odd, to say the least.

I’m not much for conspiracy theories, Abbie Hoffman once told me to never trust a conspiracy theorist because they were all in it together, but I have to agree with a lot of the comments on Cook’s missive, and Glen Greenwald’s most recent post. We all know that Greenwald managed to accept his award without getting arrested.

What has happened since?

What’s going on here…

Today’s headlines include:

Local News

Historic barns
Sixth District primary
Cell vs. landline
Wood Co. board to vote on calendar
What’s happening for Easter?

Top Headlines Poll: What do you plan to do on Easter Sunday?

Previously…

Jill is the woman in the arena…

Phyllis Rose writes:

It sometimes seems that the more people want to write, the more they tie themselves up in knots. As a college professor observing smart students in writing classes of both fiction and nonfiction, I know that people who take such courses respect writing. You don’t need to convince them of its worth, only of its possibility. So I set them exercises—on plot, dialogue, setting—of no particular value except to get them writing. Then the longer piece comes, and if they stall, I tell them, “When in doubt, begin your piece with ‘when.’ This will push you into narrative.” That advice has helped many. The other advice I often have to give is “Bash it out.” I urge people to get something on paper and then work it. I tell them “Writers need words on a page to edit the way sculptors need stone, clay, or wood to carve or mold. You have to spew out your own material before you can shape it. So bash it out.”

Bullying, it’s not just for the play ground…

What’s going on here…

Today’s headlines include:

Local News

Winter unkind to River Trail
The death penalty: Time for a change?
Community service is ‘key’
Crazy Daisy Boutique
Egg hunt held for visually impaired

Top Headlines Poll: How interested are you in seeing so-called faith-based movies?

Previously…

Then, there is this earlier permutation…