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This Video Game Shows What Sexual Harassment Can Feel Like

by MelisaEPGY Posted on April 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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In most video games, the player’s choices determine the ending. In Freshman Year, a short new work by game designer Nina Freeman, your character can wear jeans or a skirt as she prepares for a night out, go alone or with a friend, drink a little or a lot. But all paths lead to the same outcome: a creepy encounter with a man in the dark.

Freshman Year, which is free to play, explores what it feels like to get unwanted sexual attention. Like much of Freeman’s work, it’s autobiographical—based on an experience Freeman had during her first month of college.

“You feel like you’re doing this everyday life thing, and then someone comes in and disrupts that,” Freeman says. “I wanted to reflect that sense of disruption, where you feel like everything is fine, and then suddenly it’s not okay.”

Players take on the role of Nina, a girl making plans to meet her friend Jen at a bar. You navigate the game mostly by selecting conversation bubbles. For example, Nina can respond to a text from Jen with “lets not get as destroyed as last weekend lol” or “i will get you a drink tonight. i owe you like twenty haha.”

No matter what dialogue you choose for Nina, you lose control over the plotline when she ends up alone with the bar’s bouncer, who tells her she’s pretty and cuts her off as she tries to go back into the bar. Things escalate from there. The game has only one ending.

Freeman—whose other games include Ladylike, which focuses on a 12-year-old girl with a hypercritical mother, and Cibele, which is about her experience of having sex for the first time—says she designs games for the same reason some people keep a diary. “I usually want to make games about memories that I have complex feelings about, that I don’t really understand and need to sit down with,” she says.

In college, Freeman wrote and studied poetry. Confessional poets like Elizabeth Bishop and Frank O’Hara gave her a model for the work she wanted to do: “games that help players try and get close to someone else’s lived experience.”

That impulse makes her part of a wave of designers putting out noncompetitive, often narrative-heavy games. Gone Home, in which players solve a family’s mysteries by exploring an abandoned mansion, won a slew of high-profile awards when it came out in 2013; one critic called it “the future of storytelling.” (Freeman didn’t contribute to Gone Home but is currently working on another project with Fullbright, the Portland-based studio that designed it.) The same year, Depression Quest, which simulates the experience of depression, sparked the online culture war known as Gamergate.

Freeman says she feels encouraged by the response she’s gotten in the two weeks since she released Freshman Year. “People will tweet at me after they play it and be like, ‘Wow, I feel really upset now, but that was amazing,'” she says. “It’s good that they’re connecting with that aspect of it. That’s what I was going for.”

However, she’s careful to clarify that her game isn’t meant to speak for everyone who’s endured unwelcome sexual advances. “It’s obviously a game about sexual harassment, but I don’t want it to be a universal game about sexual harassment in general,” she says. “I always want to emphasize to people that this is just my experience.”

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This Video Game Shows What Sexual Harassment Can Feel Like

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From the Howard Zinn Archive: Fighting Respectability Politics at Spelman College

by MarianaTrujillo Posted on March 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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The excerpt, from a longer 1960 piece by Howard Zinn and a 2015 Paula Giddings article, are from the Nation magazine’s 150th Anniversary Special Issue on newsstands in April. They come to us from the TomDispatch website.

Finishing School for Pickets

By Howard Zinn (August 6, 1960)

One afternoon some weeks ago, with the dogwood on the Spelman College campus newly bloomed and the grass close-cropped and fragrant, an attractive, tawny-skinned girl crossed the lawn to her dormitory to put a notice on the bulletin board. It read: Young Ladies Who Can Picket Please Sign Below.

The notice revealed, in its own quaint language, that within the dramatic revolt of Negro college students in the South today another phenomenon has been developing. This is the upsurge of the young, educated Negro woman against the generations-old advice of her elders: be nice, be well-mannered and ladylike, don’t speak loudly, and don’t get into trouble. On the campus of the nation’s leading college for Negro young women—pious, sedate, encrusted with the traditions of gentility and moderation—these exhortations, for the first time, are being firmly rejected.

Spelman College girls are still “nice,” but not enough to keep them from walking up and down, carrying picket signs, in front of supermarkets in the heart of Atlanta. They are well-mannered, but this is somewhat tempered by a recent declaration that they will use every method short of violence to end segregation. As for staying out of trouble, they were doing fine until this spring, when fourteen of them were arrested and jailed by Atlanta police. The staid New England women missionaries who helped found Spelman College back in the 1880s would probably be distressed at this turn of events, and present-day conservatives in the administration and faculty are rather upset. But respectability is no longer respectable among young Negro women attending college today.

“You can always tell a Spelman girl,” alumni and friends of the college have boasted for years. The “Spelman girl” walked gracefully, talked properly, went to church every Sunday, poured tea elegantly, and had all the attributes of the product of a fine finishing school. If intellect and talent and social consciousness happened to develop also, they were, to an alarming extent, byproducts.

This is changing. It would be an exaggeration to say: “You can always tell a Spelman girl—she’s under arrest.” But the statement has a measure of truth.

Howard Zinn (1922–2010) wrote for The Nation from 1960 to 2008. Those articles are collected in Some Truths Are Not Self-Evident: Essays in The Nation on Civil Rights, Vietnam and the “War on Terror.” (eBookNation, 2014).

Learning Insubordination

By Paula J. Giddings (March 2015)

In the current age of “lean-in” feminism at one end of the spectrum and an “anti-respectability” discourse at the other, the late Howard Zinn’s essay reminds us of an earlier meaning of women’s liberation.

Zinn was of Russian-Jewish heritage, an influential historian and, in 1960, a beloved professor at Spelman College, the historically black women’s institution in the then-segregated city of Atlanta. The attribution of “finishing school” in the title was well-earned: Spelman girls, whose acceptance letters included requests to bring white gloves and girdles with them to campus, were molded to honor the virtues of “true-womanhood”: piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness.

Nevertheless, by 1960, Zinn’s students had morphed from “nice, well-mannered and ladylike” paragons of politesse to determined demonstrators who picketed, organized sit-ins, and were sometimes arrested and jailed for their efforts. “Respectability is no longer respectable among young Negro women attending college today,” Zinn concluded.

These young girls were born in the 1940s, and whatever the background of their parents (who might be sharecroppers, teachers, or doctors), their generation was destined to belong to a new stratum of Americans: the “Black Bourgeoisie,” as the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier called it. An economic class that was literally wedged in the “middle” between a small black elite and the black masses, this group emerged in no small part because of the unprecedented number of educated women who, historically excluded from pink-collar positions, now had access not only to the elite professions, but to mainstream administrative, clerical, and civil-service jobs.

For black women, burdened by stereotypes of hypersexuality, this development meant more than a triumph of simple social mobility. With education, more girls could now escape the domestic and personal service work that subjected them to the sexual exploitation of employers and others. To be able to avoid such a soul-killing future was the dream of generations of mothers for their daughters—one that I often heard from my own grandmother, who had migrated north so that my mother could be the first in the family to attain a college education. The stakes in taking advantage of these newer opportunities were indeed high and brimmed with profound meaning and emotion.

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From the Howard Zinn Archive: Fighting Respectability Politics at Spelman College

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This Is Why Under-Inflated Footballs Could Have Given Tom Brady An Advantage

by IXYEmeryebk Posted on January 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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To those of us for whom the nuances of professional football tactics are a bit of a mystery, there was one question looming over New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady’s surreal Ballghazi press conference yesterday that went unanswered: What’s so great, in theory, about a deflated football? Seems like, if anything, an under-inflated ball would be less aerodynamic?

Turns out, the potential benefit is all about grippiness. From Fox Sports:

John Eric Goff, professor of physics at Lynchburg College in Virginia and author of “Gold Medal Physics: The Science of Sports,” told FoxNews.com that the league-mandated PSI range is ideal for playing football. “If, however, there’s rain or snow or something else happening, that would make the ball a bit slicker, so having a bit less pressure in the ball makes it easier to squeeze and the grip improves,” he added.

Interesting!

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This Is Why Under-Inflated Footballs Could Have Given Tom Brady An Advantage

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President Obama Starts to Focus on the Middle Class

by JacobHaralson Posted on January 9, 2015

Mother Jones

One of the hot topics of conversation in progressive circles these days is the middle class. Democrats support plenty of programs that provide benefits to the poor (Medicaid, minimum wage, SNAP, etc.), but what about programs that benefit the middle class? What do Democrats do for them?

By coincidence, this week provides a couple of examples of programs that are targeted more at the middle class than the poor. First up is President Obama’s proposal to fund two years of free community college for everyone. As Libby Nelson explains, Pell Grants already make community college free for most low-income students:

The most radical part of Obama’s free community college proposal isn’t that it’s free — it’s that it’s universal….So the best way to look at the Obama free college plan is as a promise to the middle class. Families who earn too much for federal financial aid but aren’t wealthy enough to afford thousands of dollars of college bills are rightly feeling squeezed as tuition prices rise.

This might not be the most effective way to spend federal money. But it’s politically smart. To see why, look at pre-K. Most of the research on pre-kindergarten effectiveness is about whether it helps poor children catch up to their peers from wealthier families. But in 1995, Georgia decided to use lottery winnings to make free pre-K available not just to the poor, but to any family who wanted to join.

Two decades later, Georgia’s universal pre-K program is very popular, championed by liberals and conservatives alike. And the reason it’s managed to stay relatively apolitical and noncontroversial is that it’s universal, Fawn Johnson wrote in National Journal last year. A program just for the poor “would be about class warfare,” one Georgia Republican told her.

Elsewhere, Greg Sargent notes that new rules governing overtime wages could benefit middle-class workers:

Obama will soon announce a rules change that governs which salaried workers will get time-and-a-half over 40 hours under the Fair Labor Standards Act….“The spotlight is now on raising wages,” AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka told me. “Raising wages is the key unifying progressive value that ties all the pieces of economic and social justice together. We think the president has a great opportunity to show that he is behind that agenda by increasing the overtime regulations to a minimum threshold of $51,168. That’s the marker.”

….A lower threshold could exclude millions. In raising his voice, Trumka joins Sherrod Brown, Elizabeth Warren, and other progressive Senators who have urged a threshold of $54,000, and billionaire Nick Hanauer, who is urging $69,000. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that raising the threshold to a sum approximating what the liberal Senators want could mean higher overtime pay for at least 2.6 million more people than raising it to $42,000. EPI says setting it at over $50,000 could mean over six million people, or 54 percent of salaried workers, are now covered.

Both of these proposals would primarily benefit middle-class workers which makes it unlikely that either of them will get any support from Republicans or from the business community. But they’re worth pursuing anyway. At least they let everyone know whose side each party is on.

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President Obama Starts to Focus on the Middle Class

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There Is No Higher Ed Bubble. Yet.

by MabelBugnion Posted on December 22, 2014

Mother Jones

Is there a higher-education bubble? Will technology produce cheaper, better alternatives in the near future? Are kids and parents finally figuring out that if Bill Gates can drop out of Harvard and become the richest man in the world, maybe an Ivy League degree isn’t actually worth 50 grand a year? Dan Drezner thinks the whole idea is ridiculous, and he’s willing to put his money where his mouth is:

If, in fact, there really is a higher ed bubble, it should pop before 2020. And if it does pop, then tuition prices for college should plummet as demand slackens. After all, that’s how a bubble works — when it deflates, the price of the asset should plummet in value, like housing in 2008. So who wants to bet me that an average of the 2020 tuition rates at Stanford University, Williams College, Texas A&M and the University of Massachusetts-Lowell will be lower than today?

I’m open to changing the particular schools, but those four are a nice distribution of private and public schools, elite and not-quite-as-elite colleges, with some geographic spread. Surely, true believers in a higher ed bubble would expect tuition rates at those schools to fall.

I really don’t think that will be the case. So anyone who believes in a higher ed bubble should be happy to take the other side of that bet.

Not me. I’d be willing to bet that eventually artificial intelligence will basically wipe out the demand for higher education completely. But “eventually” means something like 30 years minimum, probably more like 40 or 50. Maybe even more if AI continues to be as intractable as some people think it will be.

In the meantime, Drezner is right: the vast, vast majority of college students don’t want to strike out on their own and try to become millionaire entrepreneurs. They just want ordinary jobs. And that’s a good thing, since if everyone wanted to run their own companies, entrepreneurs wouldn’t be able to find anyone to do all the non-CEO scutwork for their brilliant new social media startups.

So if something like 98 percent of college grads are aiming for traditional jobs in which they work for somebody else, guess what? All those somebody elses—which probably includes most of the people who think there’s a higher-ed bubble—are going to want to hire college grads. They sure don’t want to hire a bunch of losers who were too dim to drop out and become millionaires and couldn’t even manage the gumption to accrue 120 units at State U, do they?

Look: the rising cost of higher education has multiple causes, but it’s mostly driven by two simple things. At public schools, it’s driven by declining state funding, which transfers an increasing share of the cost of higher ed onto students. Unfortunately, I see no reason to think this trend won’t continue. At private schools, it’s driven by the perception of how much a private degree is worth—and right now, all the evidence suggests that even with fairly astronomical tuitions at elite and semi-elite universities, the lifetime value of a degree is still worth more than students pay for it. Universities understand this, and since these days they mostly think of themselves not as public trusts, but as businesses who simply charge whatever the traffic will bear, they know they still have plenty of headroom to increase tuition. So this trend is likely to continue as well.

If I had to guess, I’d say that there’s a class of 2nd or 3rd tier liberal arts colleges that might be in trouble. They have high tuitions, but the value of their degree isn’t really superior to that of a state university. They might be in trouble, and if Drezner added one of these places to his list it might make his bet more interesting.

But he’d still win. He might lose by 2040, but he’s safe as long as he sticks to 2020.

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There Is No Higher Ed Bubble. Yet.

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Dems Have a Clever New Plan to Turn Florida’s Governor’s Mansion Blue

by FMTTillyxk Posted on December 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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Over the past few years, Republicans across the country have adopted a novel strategy for winning elections: Change the rules to make it harder to vote against them. In seven states, Republicans passed new laws requiring voters to show photo ID before getting a ballot. They pared down early voting. In some states, they even contemplated changing how Electoral College votes are awarded in order to give the GOP candidate an advantage.

Now some Florida Democrats want to change election rules to benefit their own side—by holding big elections in the years that people actually vote. Over the past few election cycles, Democrats have thrived in presidential years, when more voters—especially young and minority voters, who tend to be Democratic—turn out to vote. But the party has floundered in off-year elections, which feature higher percentages of older, more conservative voters. Florida, like 35 other states, elects its governors in midterm years, when there is no presidential race on the ballot. Now a small group of political consultants is mulling a campaign to change that.

The Dems’ problem with midterm turnout has been particularly troublesome in Florida. Despite its purple tinge in presidential elections, Florida hasn’t elected a Democratic governor in more than 20 years. In an op-ed last month, Kevin Cate, an adviser for Charlie Crist’s failed attempt to unseat Republican Gov. Rick Scott, proposed a simple solution: Dems could change the state constitution so that Florida voters pick their governors the same years they vote for president.

In his op-ed, Cate explained why the elections are held during midterm years at all: Old-school, segregationist conservative Democrats were worried that they’d lose their control of the state party to more liberal Dems. So in 1961, they rewrote the rules to make sure state officials faced a more conservative electorate. “Today, because of this change, about 2.5 million presidential cycle voters entirely ignore the governor and the Florida Cabinet,” Cate wrote. “They could vote, or care, but they just don’t.”

Democrats have latched onto Cate’s idea. Sen. Ben Nelson—the only statewide Democrat left standing—endorsed the plan when a 20-person Democratic task force met last week.

Ben Pollara, a consultant who managed a marijuana legalization ballot initiative campaign earlier this year, has signed onto Cate’s cause and been talking with lawyers, activists, and pollsters about the viability of a waging a campaign to change the rules. “It’s a gigantic financial undertaking to put something on the ballot, much less pass it,” he explains. “It costs $2-4 million just to get something on the ballot.” Even then, 60 percent of the state’s voters must approve a measure before it changes the law.

This ballot initiative wouldn’t be an immediate fix for Florida Dems’ problems. Even if they passed the measure in 2016, it wouldn’t cut into Rick Scott’s current term. The next gubernatorial election would still happen as currently scheduled in 2018. But if Cate and Pollara’s brainchild becomes reality, Scott’s successor would only have two years in office before the new schedule kicked in for 2020.

I asked Pollara whether he was worried that Republicans would spin this idea as a desperate move, sour grapes from a bunch of political losers with no other options. “The argument for it is pretty simple, and the argument against it is cynical and partisan,” he said. “The argument for it is should our governor be elected by the most number of voters. The argument against it turns it into something partisan.” And as he noted, although such a change to the rules may help Democrats in the near term, no one can predict the ramifications decades down the line. After all, switching to midterm years was initially proposed by the state’s Democrats. “Politics is cyclical,” Pollara says. “What may help the Democrats in the short term may ultimately come back to bite them in the ass in the long term, but it remains that it is the right thing to do.”

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Dems Have a Clever New Plan to Turn Florida’s Governor’s Mansion Blue

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There Has Been a Fatal School Shooting Every 5 Weeks Since Sandy Hook

by BerniceFavenc Posted on December 9, 2014

Mother Jones

Classes were just about to begin on the morning of October 21, 2013, when 12-year-old Mason Davis heard shots ring out on the basketball court. A teacher lay sprawled on the ground as Davis started to run for the school building. Then he saw his friend and classmate, 12-year-old Jose Reyes. “Please don’t shoot me,” Davis said, “please don’t shoot me.” That’s when Reyes pointed the 9mm Ruger at him and pulled the trigger.

Davis, who was wounded in the abdomen, was lucky to survive the attack at Sparks Middle School in Nevada, as was another student who’d been shot in the shoulder. Forty-five year-old math teacher Michael Landsberry did not make it. Reyes, who reportedly had been bullied and suffered from mental health problems, also used the semiautomatic handgun he’d taken from his parents’ home that morning to put a bullet in his own head.

In the two years since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, no school shooting has claimed as many lives, nor ones as young, as on that terrible day. But fatal gun attacks at schools and on college campuses remain a fixture of American life. They have occurred once every five weeks on average since Sandy Hook, including two attacks—one in Santa Monica and another near Seattle—in which four or more victims were killed.

With an investigation drawing on data from dozens of news reports, Mother Jones has identified and analyzed 21 deadly school shootings in the past two years. The findings include:

A total of 32 victims were killed (not including shooters)
11 victims were injured
5 shooters were killed (including four who committed suicide, and one shot dead by police)
The school shootings occurred across 16 states
14 attacks occurred at K-12 schools, and 7 occurred on college or university campuses

During the same period, there have been dozens of other gun incidents on school grounds that caused injuries, as well as seven additional cases where someone committed suicide with a firearm, but no one else died. (See this report from the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety, which contains a broad list of firearm incidents at schools.) A handful of the cases we analyzed involved shooters who appeared to have mental health problems, a prominent factor in the mass shootings database we compiled for another investigation. (The attack last May near UC Santa Barbara is not included here because although college students were among the victims it did not take place on campus.) Several other cases appeared related to gang violence or domestic disputes. Though it’s not clear in all cases what type of firearms were used, in several the perpetrators wielded shotguns, semi-automatic handguns, and AR-15-style assault rifles.

A surveillance photo of the shooter entering the Santa Monica College library. Santa Monica Police/ZUMA

Gun violence has regularly been at the political forefront since Newtown. While Congress failed to pass a background check bill four months after the devastation, state lawmakers nationwide approved more than a hundred laws either strengthening or weakening restrictions on firearms in the first year after Sandy Hook alone. Gun rights activists have responded by provoking controversy with open-carry demonstrations, while on the gun-control side, major new players have emerged. Lockdown drills have become common at schools, and many have added armed personnel or even tested active-shooter detection systems that use technology deployed in war zones. In November, for the first time in 15 years, a state decided by popular vote to require universal background checks for gun buyers.

All the same, the toll has gone on, with hundreds of children shot to death, daily violence routinely claiming multiple victims, and mass shootings becoming three times more frequent.

Below is the dataset from the investigation. View it in its entirety by clicking here for the Google spreadsheet. Research was contributed by Mother Jones editorial fellow Bryan Schatz.

For more of Mother Jones’ reporting on guns in America, see all of our latest coverage here, and our award-winning special reports.

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There Has Been a Fatal School Shooting Every 5 Weeks Since Sandy Hook

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43 Mexican College Students Disappeared Weeks Ago. What Happened to Them?

by rikkiqlyons Posted on October 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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Nearly three weeks have passed since 43 Mexican college students went missing in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero after clashing with local police suspected of having ties to the Guerreros Unidos cartel. A break in the case seemingly came earlier this week when a mass grave with 28 bodies was unearthed, but Mexican authorities later said the students were not among the dead. (That remains unclear.) What exactly is going on?

Let’s start from the beginning. Who are these college students?
The students went missing on September 26 after trying to collect money to attend upcoming protests against discriminatory hiring practices for teachers, according to the Guardian. The students were in Iguala, a town about two and a half hours inland from Acapulco. After fundraising and protesting in Iguala, the students apparently tried to hitchhike back to their rural teacher’s college in Tixtla, about two hours south of Iguala, but police say the students eventually commandeered three buses from a local terminal.

According to the Guardian, local police chased the buses down and apparently opened fire. The buses stopped, the unarmed students got out, and the attacks got worse. Many of the students apparently fled, but roughly 20 of them were taken away in patrol cars. Later, some of the students returned to the scene and were talking to reporters when they were assaulted again by police or other gunmen. Two students reportedly died, and one was left in a vegetative state. “The body of a third student was found dumped nearby later, his face reportedly skinned and his eye gouged out,” the Guardian reported.

The students’ school, the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers College of Ayotzinapa, is one of more than a dozen around the country that formed after Mexico’s revolution with the goal of raising living standards for impoverished Mexicans and teaching poor farmers to read and write, according to the Christian Science Monitor. The schools are typically seen as leftist, and people from this school, in particular, were some of the major players in the run-up to the Tlatelolco Massacre, a violent clash between students and police in Mexico City in 1968 that led to dozens of deaths.

It’s unclear whether the students’ politics played a role in the attacks. Students from the school reportedly seized and vandalized Iguala’s city hall in June 2013, according to the Wall Street Journal, and have clashed with police there before. “They practically destroyed the building,” an Iguala city councilman told the Journal. “That’s what these boys do. They cause trouble.” The Journal added that the attacks could also have come about as the students were commandeering the buses; police could have feared that the students were going to disrupt a political rally organized by the mayor’s wife set for the same evening.

But what about the cops who led the assault on the students?
Four days after the attack, the state government charged 22 municipal police officers with murder, according to the Guardian, but many more might have been involved. Corruption among Mexican police is a well-covered issue, but this situation reflects how things have reached a whole new level. Ioan Grillo, a veteran reporter who has covered narco crime in Mexico for more than a decade, wrote in the New York Times that this was something new: “As I inhaled the stench of death on that hill, and saw photos of the mutilated student on the road, I felt as never before that I was covering an act of pure unadulterated evil.”

Grillo explained that while the slaughtering of students may “seem inexplicable,” the truth is that drug cartels have taken over so completely that they either control government officials or are themselves the government officials. “Being ruled by corrupt and self-interested politicians can be bad,” Grillo wrote. “But imagine being ruled by sociopathic gangsters. They respond to rowdy students in the only way they understand: with extreme violence designed to cause terror. They stick the mutilated body of a student on public display in the same way they do rival traffickers.”

After the attacks, the federal government took away the local police force’s power and brought in hundreds of its own cops.

Which cartel is behind the violence?
The working theory is that Guerreros Unidos (Warriors United) got the police to attack the students, mounted the attack themselves, or worked directly with police. According to Grillo, Guerreros Unidos is a cartel fighting to control a strategic drug transport area packed with marijuana and opium fields. The cartel operates valuable drug corridors in Guerrero and Morelos, the state immediately to the northeast, according to the Independent.

It’s hard to stay on top of the ever-evolving Mexican cartel breakdown, but here’s what we know: Guerreros Unidos was formed in 2009 after breaking away from the Beltrán Leyva Organization (BLO) following Arturo Beltrán Leyva’s death. According to InSight Crime, a foundation that studies organized crime in the Americas, Guerreros Unidos is in a bitter turf war with Los Rojos (also an offshoot of the BLO) and the Knights Templar (a separate cartel) for control of the area’s drug routes. The BBC has reported that the turf battle has taken a bite out of drug profits, so the cartel also makes money from kidnapping, extortion, and collecting fees.

The cartel’s extracurricular activities have put it in the crosshairs of the federal government, which, under President Enrique Peña Nieto, has been trying to look like it’s taking on the country’s most powerful cartels. The drug wars between the cartels and the Mexican federal government had apparently gotten quieter in recent times because, as the Washington Post notes, “the gore, it seems, was bad for business.”

That pressure may have also led one of the leaders of Guerreros Unidos, Benjamín Mondragón Pereda, to kill himself earlier this week after being surrounded by police. Iguala’s mayor and police chief, both suspected of working closely with the cartel, are on the run.

What happened with the unearthing of the mass grave?
When word came after the students’ disappearance that there was a mass grave found nearby, it seemed reasonable that it was the final resting place for the bodies. But yesterday Mexican authorities announced that none of the 28 bodies belonged to any of the students. As the Post reported after the announcement, the news brought fresh hope for families that the students may still be alive, but “to the rest of Mexico, the news that 28 mutilated, charred corpses correspond to another group of victims is a new stop on a carousel of horrors.”

There are at least eight more burial sites in just that area, the Post noted, and it’s possible the students are in one or more of them. (The Post notes that authorities haven’t said how many dead have been recovered, or who the bodies might be.) In fact, Guerrero is home to the largest mass grave ever found in Mexico: In 2010, authorities discovered more than 60 people who had been bound and gagged, some dismembered and decapitated, and thrown down a mine ventilation shaft.

So what’s next?
The disappearance and likely murder of the college students has led to mass protests across the country, with Mexicans once again arguing that the government isn’t doing enough to protect them. In Chilpancingo, the state capital of Guerrero, protesters have burned government buildings and demanded the resignation of the state’s governor. Meanwhile, the federal government has said it will continue to search for the students and try to identify the bodies found in the additional burial sites.

This article – 

43 Mexican College Students Disappeared Weeks Ago. What Happened to Them?

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If You Pay Them, They Will Come

by DorothyTremblay Posted on October 9, 2014

Mother Jones

Here’s something you don’t see every day: a news article about employers who desperately want to hire more people but just can’t find workers with the right skills. Oh wait. You do see that every day. What you don’t see are articles which make it clear that a willingness to pay higher wages is all it takes to fix this problem:

Manufacturing wages are rising at a rapid clip in some major industrial states as shortages of certain skills and gradually falling unemployment rates force more companies to pay up to attract and retain workers.

….“What we mainly need is welders,” said Terry McIver, chief executive and owner of Loadcraft Industries Ltd., a maker of parts for oil rigs in Brady, Texas….Dewayne Roy, head of the welding program at Mountain View College in Dallas, said he recently had a waiting list of about 250 people seeking to enroll. One student, Logan Porter, 22, started working for a metal-fabrication shop in the Dallas area in February and is putting in 55 to 60 hours a week. He earns $17 an hour, but with time and a half for overtime, his weekly take-home pay typically exceeds $800. “I love the work,” he said.

….Steve Van Loan, president of Sullivan Palatek Inc. in Michigan City, said job hopping is becoming more of a problem. “They get an offer for more money across town, and they’re gone,” he said. Wages on average at his firm, which makes compressors that power drills and other tools, are rising 4% to 5% this year, compared with 2% to 3% in recent years, Mr. Van Loan said.

How about that? If you pay more, you attract workers with the right skills. If you pay more, training programs start to fill up. If you pay more, you can steal folks away from your competitors.

Pay is the great equalizer. There are always going to be shortages of specific skills in specific times and places. But a long-term nationwide shortage? That just means employers aren’t willing to pay market wages. They should read their Milton Friedman. If you pay them, they will come.

Continued here:

If You Pay Them, They Will Come

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When I Was 5, I, Um — What Were We Just Talking About?

by Dick5455uv Posted on September 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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I remember approximately diddly-squat1 about my childhood. But why? Melissa Dahl explains the latest research to me today:

The way parents tend to talk to their sons is different from the way they talk to their daughters. Mothers tend to introduce more snippets of new information in conversations with their young daughters than they do with their young sons, research has shown. And moms tend to ask more questions about girls’ emotions; with boys, on the other hand, they spend more time talking about what they should do with those feelings.

This is at least partially a product of parents acting on gender expectations they may not even realize they have, and the results are potentially long-lasting, explained Azriel Grysman, a psychologist at Hamilton College who studies gender differences and memory. “The message that girls are getting is that talking about your feelings is part of describing an event,” Grysman said….“And it’s quite possible, over time, that those tendencies will help women establish more connections in their brains of different pieces of an event, which will lead to better memory long-term.”

So I can blame my crappy memory on my mother? Cool.

1This is a technical term used by neurologists and memory researchers.

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When I Was 5, I, Um — What Were We Just Talking About?

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