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Women Harassed Out of Their Homes. Mass Shooting Threats. How #Gamergate Morphed Into a Monster.

by LauriElliot Posted on October 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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Video game critic and feminist author Anita Sarkeesian canceled a speaking engagement at Utah State University on Tuesday after an email from an unknown source promised “the deadliest school shooting in American history” and threatened that Sarkeesian would “die screaming like the craven little whore that she is if you let her come to USU.” Sarkeesian is the creator of an online video series that critiques mainstream video games for misogyny; she has long been the target of violent threats from online trolls. Despite that Sarkeesian had every reason to be concerned about the specter of vicious misogyny mixed with guns, USU officials said that under state law concealed weapons could not be barred from the event. She blasted the university late Wednesday for how it handled the situation:

Sarkeesian noted recently that she has been “subjected to the worst harassment I’ve ever faced” as part of a convoluted conflict known as #Gamergate, which has been roiling the gaming industry since August. Playing out primarily on social media, #Gamergate centers around several women who work in the industry and have criticized its dominant macho culture and frequent sexualization of women. Their critique has met with intense harassment and bullying. The FBI is currently investigating the threats against Sarkeesian and others, according to Vice.

On one level, #Gamergate is an internal squabble between ideologically opposed factions within the gaming world. But now, disturbing developments such as Sarkeesian’s cancelled appearance reflect how the controversy has blown up beyond the familiar trappings of online nastiness and spilled into real life—with serious consequences. At least two women involved in #Gamergate have said that they had to flee their homes, fearing for their safety. Kyle Wagner at Deadspin suggests that #Gamergate may be no less than “the future of grievance politics as they will be carried out by people who grew up online.”

So what is #Gamergate and how did this all start?
#Gamergate is essentially an escalating fight about the direction of gaming culture. It pits a group of feminists and their supporters—who advocate for expanding beyond the testosterone-fueled games that dominate the industry—against a vocal faction that is openly hostile toward their views. The conflict first blew up in August after a programmer named Eron Gonji wrote a revenge post about his breakup with developer Zoe Quinn, the creator of Depression Quest, a critically acclaimed game whose purpose is to illustrate the challenges of coping with depression.

The post implied Quinn had a romantic relationship with a writer for Kotaku, the gaming site run by Gawker Media, supposedly to receive favorable coverage of Depression Quest. In fact, Kotaku never reviewed the game, but nasty attacks against Quinn—including the circulation of nude photos, death threats, and rape threats—quickly flooded sites like Reddit and 4chan. Sarkeesian experienced similar threats just a few days later, after publishing a new video in her series on women and gaming. Brianna Wu, a developer behind a game with all female lead characters, has written about harassment of women in the industry; she received a series of graphic death threats last week after sharing a meme making fun of #Gamergate. She said she had to flee her home as a result.

Who is responsible for all this nastiness?

It’s hard to say: Most of the viciousness comes from anonymous trolls. However, a couple of particular players have helped inflame the situation:

Adam Baldwin, perhaps best known for portraying paranoid mercenary Jayne Cobb in “Firefly” and for voicing strident political views on social media, chimed in:

Milo Yiannopoulos, associate editor at Breitbart.com, also helped fuel the haters with a blog post in which he declared “an army of sociopathic feminist programmers and campaigners, abetted by achingly politically correct American tech bloggers, are terrorising the entire community.”

What’s the deal with those strange hashtags and other terms?
Here’s a quick primer:

8chan – a site that allows anyone to anonymously create their own message board. Threads related to #Gamergate originally sprung up on 4chan, but were banned for breaking the site’s policy on distributing personal information. At that point, the conversation largely moved to 8chan.

“Social justice warrior” (or SJW) – a derisive term used by many in the #Gamergate crowd to describe its feminist and otherwise inclusion-minded critics. It’s largely synonymous with “PC police.”

#NotYourShield – a Twitter hashtag used to point out that not all #Gamergate supporters are white and/or male. It’s been used by women and people of color sympathetic to the cause to counter claims that the movement is inherently misogynistic or comprised solely of gaming’s status quo. Some claim that many “sock puppets,” or fake accounts, have been created to make the tag appear more popular than it is; there is no way to confirm or deny this.

#StopGamerGate2014 – a Twitter hashtag that has garnered around 75,000 tweets since it first appeared late Tuesday night (#gamergate has been getting around 100,000 tweets a day). It’s essentially a form of counter-protest.

So what is this really all about?
#Gamergaters, as they’re called, say their target isn’t women but instead what they deem to be corrupt journalism. They claim the fact that a game developer like Quinn once had a romantic relationship with a writer at Kotaku is evidence that media coverage of games can be bought and sold with sexual favors. But the writer in question never reviewed Quinn’s game, and nor did anyone else at Kotaku. Kotaku looked into the accusations and said it found no evidence of a conflict of interest.

#Gamergaters argue more broadly that journalists are too cozy with game developers—they fund their projects, date them, and are sometimes roommates or friends with them—which makes it impossible, they say, for gamers to trust reviews from gaming news sites. Polygon, Kotaku, and the Verge have come under attack along these lines. (You can read about their ethics policies here, here, and here.) Other #Gamergaters take issue with a growing pool of gaming writers and editors interested in issues of diversity, inclusion, sexism, and violence in video games. “Headlines are becoming less about gaming and more about mysoginy sic, feminism, and are reduced to click-grabbing disappointments,” laments one manifesto.

Meanwhile, there is an email listserv called GamingJournoPros that some industry writers use to discuss trends and new releases; its recent “discovery” by Breitbart.com has prompted additional outrage among #Gamergaters, despite that there are multitudes of such listservs in journalism. (Read more from its moderator here.) On the other hand, popular gaming critic Leigh Alexander has compiled a list of more substantive ethics issues in the trade. For instance, “One of the US’s most long-running and successful print game publications is owned by one of the world’s best-known game retailers, and few of the magazine’s consumers seem aware of what, if any impact that relationship might have.”

How are tech and social media companies reacting?
Intel was pulled into #Gamergate early this month when it bowed to pressure from an email blizzard by yanking it ads from Gamasutra, one of several sites that have published essays critical of rampant sexism in gamer culture. Subsequently criticized for that move, the company apologized two days later but hasn’t reinstated the ads.

Though #Gamergate first caught fire on 4Chan, it exploded on more mainstream social media outlets such as Reddit and Twitter, which have been criticized for providing a platform for its worst elements. On Saturday, for example, developer Brianna Wu left her home after a Twitter user sent her a string of threats including a pledge to choke her to death with her husband’s penis. Though Twitter has suspended those accounts, critics argue it could do much more by, say, actively detecting hostile behavior, limiting sock puppet, or fake, accounts, and making it easier to block users. Twitter spokesman Nu Wexler referred Mother Jones to the company’s user rules banning targeted abuse. He declined to say how many accounts have been suspended in relation to #Gamergate or if any have been referred to law enforcement.

On Reddit, a group devoted to #Gamergate has more than 11,000 subscribers. Many of the comments in these threads are misogynistic, and Zoe Quinn has produced logs of Reddit chatrooms that show gamers planning to hack her personal accounts. Even so, Reddit’s moderators haven’t shut down its main #Gamergate page. (In contrast, a #Gamergate forum on Github has been disabled by the site’s staff.) “We received a number of contacts related to this issue,” Reddit spokeswoman Victoria Taylor wrote in response to questions from Mother Jones. “Anything that we found or that was reported to us that broke our rules was removed and the user banned.” But it seems that the fallout from #Gamergate hasn’t prompted much concern or soul searching at Reddit: “We do not plan on changing any site policies due to the occurrence of this event.”

How have leaders in the gaming industry responded?
Pushback on the nastiness from the world of gaming journalism has included comments from Stephen Totilo, the editor-in-chief of Kotaku (and #Gamergate’s journalistic enemy number one), who published a piece criticizing the movement and its tactics:

“All of us at Kotaku condemn the sort of harassment that’s being carried out against critics, developers, journalists, and other members of the gaming community. If you’re someone who harasses people online, you’re not a part of the community we want to foster at Kotaku, and you’re actively hurting people and driving important voices away from the video game scene. Enough.”

Chris Plante at Polygon, the Vox Media-owned video game site and frequent #Gamergate punching bag, scolded:

“This week, the obstinate child threw a temper tantrum, and the industry was stuck in the metaphorical grocery store as everyone was forced to suffer through it together. But unlike a child, the people behind these temper tantrums are hurting others. It’s time to grow up.”

And Keith Stuart, games editor of the Guardian wrote:

“I have found a lot of the actions of self-confessed hardcore gamers horrendous, upsetting and unjustifiable over the past two weeks… I don’t have a problem with the term ‘gamer’… I have a problem with gamers who deny that this industry needs to improve its representation – in terms of race, gender and sexuality.”

On Wednesday, the Entertainment Software Association, gaming’s largest industry group, issued a short statement:

“Threats of violence and harassment are wrong… They have to stop. There is no place in the video game community—or our society—for personal attacks and threats.”

And developer Andreas Zecher wrote a widely-circulated “open letter to the gaming community” posted to Medium:

“We believe that everyone, no matter what gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion or disability has the right to play games, criticize games and make games without getting harassed or threatened… If you see hateful, harassing speech, take a public stand against it and make the gaming community a more enjoyable space to be in.”

The letter was signed by hundreds in the gaming community, including people from big-time studios like Electronic Arts, Microsoft, Ubisoft, and Nintendo.

From the indie community, developer Phil Fish has led the charge to defend Quinn and others:

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Women Harassed Out of Their Homes. Mass Shooting Threats. How #Gamergate Morphed Into a Monster.

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"Hurt That Bitch": What Undercover Investigators Saw Inside a Factory Farm

by VRBSanorabni Posted on October 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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This is an excerpt from Mother Jones contributing writer Ted Genoways’ new book The Chain: Farm, Factory, and the Fate of Our Food.

On September 15, 2008, Lynn Becker got the phone call every hog farmer fears.

For months on end, pork producers across the Midwest had been struggling against record-low prices per head, but Becker had taken steps to protect his family’s farm against contractions of the market. He had signed a producer agreement with Hormel Foods, maybe the one company with a recession-proof demand for pork, and he had planted enough of his own corn to sustain his herd for the next year, insulating his operation from skyrocketing feed prices. With another Minnesota winter already in the air, Becker was out walking his fields one last time before starting the harvest. “When I got in and checked the answering machine,” he told me later, “there was a message from Matt Prescott with PETA.” Becker was soft-spoken but bristled with nervous energy. His jitters, together with his work-honed physique and fair hair, made him seem much younger than forty. But he insisted that the four years since receiving the call from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals had aged him by more than a decade. “They had ‘damning evidence,'” he said haltingly. “Undercover. Of animal abuse. On a farm that we own.”

Becker described his hog operation outside Fairmont, Minnesota, a little more than an hour due west of Austin on Interstate 90, as a “good old-fashioned, American family farm”—and it might appear that way at first. Everything about the old homestead suggests its age, from the weathered, brick-red Dutch Gambrel barn emblazoned with the name, lb pork, to the simple farmhouse that Becker’s grandfather built in the 1940s—the house where all big decisions are still made on Sundays around the dinner table. But in truth, Becker was already a major supplier, providing more than fifty thousand pigs to Hormel each year, and he was making a bid to double that number by bringing the whole supply chain, from seed to slaughter, under his control. He owned 1,500 acres of prime farmland, where he raised corn and soybeans, which he put up in a colossal grain bin and ground at his own feed mill and then trucked to more than a dozen sites in Minnesota and Iowa to feed to thousands of pregnant sows in his breeding barns and tens of thousands of weaned piglets at separate finishing facilities. The company was sprawling and complex, employing dozens of full-time and part-time workers, and it was only getting bigger. Still, Becker insists that he always personally monitored every phase of his business. And as the voice message claiming animal abuse started to sink in, his shock and disbelief quickly turned to indignation.

“Wait a second,” he remembered thinking. “Not on any farm I own.”

Then it dawned on him. The farm in question wasn’t LB Pork or even his breeding facility, Camalot, about ten miles away outside the town of Welcome. The farm that PETA had investigated was a large barn complex, housing some six thousand sows and tens of thousands of newborn piglets, that Becker had acquired less than a month before in Iowa, an operation he had purchased from Natural Pork Production II and renamed MowMar Farms but had only ever seen a few times. Becker phoned his day-to-day management company, Suidae Health & Production, based in Algona, Iowa, and asked them to reach out to Prescott and see if they could get their hands on this “damning evidence”; maybe the video they claimed to have in their possession had all been shot before the facility was under his ownership.

Everything You Didn’t Want to Know About Hormel, Bacon, and Amputated Limbs:

Meanwhile, Becker worked his connections. He was the president of the Minnesota Pork Board, and his wife, Julie, had been the Minnesota Pork Promoter of the Year in 2007. In fact, she was, at that very moment, on Capitol Hill with the Minnesota Pork Producers Association, the lobbying arm of the Pork Board, meeting with members of Congress. Becker called his wife so she could alert her fellow lobbyists. Then he placed another call to Cindy Cunningham, the assistant vice president for communications at the National Pork Board in Des Moines, Iowa.

Soon Becker heard back that PETA wanted to meet with him one-on-one and then stage a joint press conference. Everyone advised against it. Instead, with the assistance of Himle Horner, a public relations firm in the Twin Cities, he decided to issue a written statement, and Cunningham mobilized several agribusiness organizations to help answer press inquiries. But nothing could have prepared them for the onslaught of negative attention. The next day, when the Associated Press released the video online along with a wire report describing its contents, the story became worldwide news almost instantly. The video’s camerawork was shaky and low-definition, captured with recorders hidden in the hat brims of undercover workers, but it had been cut together into a concise and harrowing five minutes.

In one shot, a supervisor was shown beating a sow relentlessly on the back. In another, workers turned electric prods on a crippled sow and kicked pregnant sows repeatedly in the belly. A close-up showed a distressed sow knocked out, her face royal blue from the Prima Tech marking dye sprayed into her nostrils by a worker who said he was trying “to get her high.” In one of the most disturbing sequences, a worker demonstrated the method for euthanizing underweight piglets: taking them by the hind legs and smashing their skulls against the concrete floor. Fellow workers whooped and laughed as he tossed the bloodied and twitching bodies into a giant bin. The AP story revealed that PETA had already met with Tom Heater, the sheriff of Greene County, Iowa, and he had agreed to open a criminal investigation.


Gagged by Big Ag


You Won’t Believe What Pork Producers Do to Pregnant Pigs


Has Your State Outlawed Blowing the Whistle on Factory Farm Abuses?


Timeline: Big Ag’s Campaign to Shut Up Its Critics


The Cruelest Show on Earth

That night, Becker played the PETA video again and again on his iPad. He told me he felt numb as he watched his inbox fill with more than a thousand angry emails. He was starting to see what an ordeal the release of this video was going to be. But worse, he feared that Hormel would terminate its production contract with him—the contract he had used to secure a loan of more than $1 million to mortgage the breed barns in Iowa, with his family’s homestead in Minnesota as collateral. If Hormel decided that Becker had become a liability, he and his family could lose everything.

A couple of miles north of Bayard, Iowa, at the crossroads of two wide gravel tracks, there are three enormous sow barns: the site of Lynn Becker’s MowMar Farms. It’s now operated under the name Fair Creek, though you’d never know it; there are no company signs, no indication at all of what’s going on inside. The barns gleam white in the sun and seem, by all appearances, to be well ventilated, well supplied with water from giant external holding tanks, and generally well turned-out, right down to their square corners and tightly tacked aluminum siding. Gary Weihs (pronounced WISE), the site’s original developer, saw to it that the facility was clean, inconspicuous, and odor-free. It took him two years of disputes and disagreements to get a permit recommendation from the board of supervisors for Greene County, so he wanted to be sure there were no complaints once the facility was built.

After spending years working with large corporations like Pepsi, Procter & Gamble, and Monsanto in operational management, Weihs had decided to return to his native Iowa. He planned to combine the experience he had gained growing up on his father’s hog farm outside of Harlan with the statistical analysis of three decades of corn pricing and hog yields he had performed to complete his MBA at Harvard Business School. “We flat price everything,” Weihs told the National Hog Farmer, “so that we make a little bit per head and base our profits on quantity.” Under the name Natural Pork Production II (NPPII), he lined up investors and, when he had the start-up money in place, began building facilities, about one per year. The three-barn complex in Bayard was the fifth unit—a 6,000-sow farrow-to-wean operation, where returns would be generated for investors by selling roughly 130,000 weaned pigs each year to finishing operations at $36 apiece. All told, NPPII facilities were supplying about fifteen different hog farmers with close to 800,000 weaned pigs, for gross annual earnings of nearly $29 million—but all while carrying precarious overheard, including roughly $5 million in construction costs per site and millions more invested in the breeding sows housed inside.

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"Hurt That Bitch": What Undercover Investigators Saw Inside a Factory Farm

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Everything You Didn’t Want to Know About Hormel, Bacon, and Amputated Limbs

by MadelinRuz Posted on October 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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Much of the outrage generated by the meat industry involves the rough treatment of animals. But as Ted Genoways shows in his searing new book The Chain: Farm, Factory, and the Fate of Our Food—which grew out of his long-form 2011 Mother Jones piece “The Spam Factory’s Dirty Secret”—the people employed in its factory-scale slaughterhouses have it pretty rough, too. The book hinges on a rare neurological disorder that, in the mid-2000s, began to affect workers in a Spam factory in Austin, Minnesota—particularly ones who worked in the vicinity of the “brain machine,” which, as Genoways writes, used compressed air to blast slaughtered pigs’ brains “into a pink slurry.” As Genoways memorably puts it: “A high-pressure burst, a fine rosy mist, and the slosh of brains slipping through a drain hole into a catch bucket.” I recently caught up with him to talk about the world of our dark, Satanic meat mills, and the bright spots he sees after immersing himself in it.

Mother Jones: When did you first get interested in the meat industry?

Ted Genoways: I’m a fourth generation Nebraskan, and my grandfather, my dad’s dad, during the Depression, worked in the packinghouses in Omaha around the union stockyards there. One Sunday, when they were visiting relatives just outside of Omaha, my grandfather decided to take my dad in to see the packing houses, and into the hog-kill room, when he was probably about 10 years old. And my dad said that he was just sort of overwhelmed by the noise and the screeching of the hogs and the terror. My first book was a book of poems, Bullroarer: A Sequence, that had one section that dealt with some of that.

MJ: How did you go from poetry to investigating this disturbing brain disorder among meat-packing workers?

TG: Around 2000, I had a job working as a book editor at the Minnesota Historical Society Press, and the first book that I worked on there was a book called Packinghouse Daughter, by Cheri Register, about the packinghouse strike in Albert Lea, Minnesota, in 1959. Her father was one of the meatpacking workers there. I also read Peter Rachleff’s book about the Hormel strike in the ’80s in Austin, Minnesota, Hard-Pressed in the Heartland.

So it caught my eye in 2007 when there were some AP stories, and eventually the New York Times did a story, about the outbreak of this neurological disorder among the packing house workers at Quality Pork Processors in Austin. The fact that the people affected were almost entirely Hispanic intrigued me.

I started by wanting to tell the story of this medical mystery, but what quickly evolved was a picture of the hiring practices at QPP and how that tied back to the history of the strikes—there was just this whole universe that was contained in that story.

MJ: Rural Minnesota is a pretty white place. What did the strikes have to do with transforming the plant’s workforce from majority white to majority Hispanic?

TG: In 1986 the strike ends, and in ’87, they Hormel management announce that half the plant is a new company, called Quality Pork Producers, and the hundreds of people who worked there would be offered their jobs back, but no longer under the union contract.

And without union protection, the native work force began to drift away. In no time, you’ve got a nearly all-Hispanic workforce that’s made up hugely of undocumented workers. What surprises me is how quickly the communities turned their anger toward the new arrivals, and not the company itself.

TP: You report that since the launch of QPP, there’s been an emphasis on speeding up the kill line. And that ends up being the probable trigger for the neurological disease you dug into.

TG: Right, the line speed becomes the issue that the Mayo Clinic doctors see as the key factor in explaining what was happening—exposure to hogs’ aerosolized brain tissue increases as the volume of hogs processed goes up—a messy job got messier. And at the height of the 2007 recession, the demand for Spam was so high that they were offering overtime hours, so the hours of the exposure increased.

But beyond this neurological disorder that’s tied to the line speed, there’s all the repetitive stress injuries, there’s obviously the kind of traumatic injuries that occur from cuts and amputations on the line—all of those increase when line speed increases. I talked to a number of people who said, when amputations occurred among the workers, and you’ve got somebody who’s had a finger chopped off or has had a deep cut on their arm so that they’re bleeding all over their station, there’s somebody there to just pause that station and clean it while the rest of the line continues to move. Workers told me that at peak times, they’re not allowed bathroom breaks, or even ordinary breaks to sharpen knives or to wash their hands. And the more I got to looking at it, I started to see how line speed affects all phases of production.

MJ: Talk about some of those effects.

Ted Genoways Photo: Mary Ann Andrei

TG: First, you need more hogs coming in the door. And what that means right away is more CAFOs concentrated animal feeding operations, or factory-scale livestock farms. Ideally for the packers, it means more involvement in the CAFOs, how they’re run, what their production schedules are, what the animals are fed in order to produce an animal that has the lean-to-fat ratio that matches your needs for various products.

The other thing is if you’re going to increase speed but not increase the workforce, it means more mechanization, which is very often kind of experimental. And sometimes where things break down is in the quality of the meat or just how well it’s cut. Sometimes what breaks down is how sanitary it is, or how safe the workers are.

For the machine to work right, and especially for it to work right at high speed, every cut going into it has to be the same size. And as mind-boggling as it is, it’s cheaper for the company on that kind of scale to control the size of the hog than to change the size of the cut inside the plant.

And of course this is where you get all of the breeding programs, the antibiotics and growth enhancers that they’re fed so that every hog is on the exact same program and is coming to be the same size.

MJ: You dig deeply into the the special US Department of Agriculture program—known as HIMP, in the department’s evocative acronym—that allowed Hormel to run its line much faster than the industry standard.

TG: The argument that was made in the early ’90s, when this was first pushed, was that the old inspection model was outmoded. They said what we need instead is a modern system that will focus on microbiological testing. And that sounds like common sense. The problem is that the way that they wanted to implement this was to reduce the number of inspectors. That reduced number of inspectors then would be responsible for double-checking the inspection that would be carried out by the companies themselves.

And the companies argued that what this would allow them to do would be to run the line faster—they said, we’ll put out more product which will bring the price down for consumers, and we’ll have a safer product coming out as well. And it’ll reduce government costs. So it sounds like the perfect thing all around. The problem they had is what it essentially did was put the companies in charge of their own inspection.

MJ: As I know from covering it myself, and know even better after reading your book, the meat industry is a relentlessly bleak topic. From your reporting, did you find any hope for positive change?

TG: The meat industry operates under the assumption that what people care about in food is low cost. And what foodie movements have done, as they move toward the mainstream, is demonstrate that people will pay a little bit more for food that they feel is safe—the animal has been well-treated, the workers have been well-treated.

The other thing we’re seeing is that Americans’ meat consumption has leveled off and even started to drop a little bit in recent years. People have said, “I’ll take a smaller portion if it’s higher quality, and I’ll pay a little bit more for it but I’ll worry a little less about what’s in it.” And if enough people will do that, the industry will respond.

My other concern is that as the American consumer becomes more aware and enlightened about all this, the meat industry is also doing its best to move into all parts of the global market. And there’s still lots of parts of the world where just having food is something that is a major issue—so you’re back to the lowest-possible-cost idea.

MJ: That makes me think of the fact that our biggest pork producer of all, Smithfield, recently got bought by a Chinese company—so even though we’re eating less factory-farmed meat here, production could actually increase, driven by demand in China.

TG: Yes. But still, here in the US, very few people were thinking about the meat industry ten years ago. You talk to people about it now, and everybody is aware of Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser and the whole wave of people who have come behind who are informing the public about all of this, and I think people are making different choices, now that they have that information.

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Everything You Didn’t Want to Know About Hormel, Bacon, and Amputated Limbs

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Rate of Mass Shootings Has Tripled Since 2011, Harvard Research Shows

by LarhondaFUQC Posted on October 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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Editor’s note: The authors are scholars from the Harvard School of Public Health; this article details their independent research, which is based on the mass shootings data Mother Jones has collected and published since 2012.

In June, following gun attacks in California and Oregon, President Obama remarked that mass shootings are “becoming the norm.” But some commentators claim that mass shootings are not on the rise. So which is it?

Have mass shootings become more common?
According to our statistical analysis of more than three decades of data, in 2011 the United States entered a new period in which mass shootings are occurring more frequently. Our analysis used data compiled by Mother Jones on attacks that took place in public, in which the shooter and the victims generally were unrelated and unknown to each other, and in which the shooter murdered four or more people. (An incident with four or more homicide victims was the threshold count for mass killing established by the FBI a decade ago; a federal law signed by President Obama in 2013 defined the threshold as three or more victims killed.)

So why do we keep hearing in the media that mass shootings have not increased?
This view stems from the work of Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox, who has long maintained that mass shootings are a stable phenomenon. (“The growing menace lies more in our fears than in the facts,” he has said.) But Fox’s oft–cited claim is based on a misguided approach to studying the problem: The data he uses includes all homicides in which four or more people were murdered with a gun. His analysis, which counts the number of events per year, lumps together mass shootings in public places with a far more numerous set of mass murders that are contextually distinct—a majority of which stem from domestic violence and occur in private homes. Fox’s annual count and use of overly broad data including many types of mass killings fail to detect the recent shift in public mass shootings.

Our method and how it works
We used a Statistical Process Control (SPC) method that analyzes the time interval between each incident. This is more effective than counting the annual number of incidents because it is more sensitive to detecting changes in frequency when the number of events per year is small, as is the case with public mass shootings. SPC methods were first developed for industry, to identify changes in the process underlying a specific problem, so that root causes of that problem could be better assessed. This approach has proved effective in healthcare, for example, helping to reduce surgical errors. For the method to work, it is crucial to analyze events that are qualitatively similar. In other words, to assess the rate of public mass shootings it is necessary to exclude mass killings that are qualitatively distinct, like those taking place in private homes.

What our analysis reveals
As the chart above shows, a public mass shooting occurred on average every 172 days since 1982. The orange reference line depicts this average; data points below the orange line indicate shorter intervals between incidents, i.e. mass shootings occurring at a faster pace. Since September 6, 2011, there have been 14 public mass shootings at an average interval of less than 172 days. A run of nine points or more below the orange average line is considered a statistical signal that the underlying process has changed. (A nine-point run below the average is about as likely to occur by chance as flipping a coin nine times and getting heads nine times in a row—the probability is less than 1 percent. The 14-point run we see here is even more unlikely to have occurred by chance.) The standard interpretation of this chart would be that mass shootings, as of September 2011, are now part of a new, accelerated, process.

Because the chart signals that a new process started around September 2011, we can divide the chart at that point to analyze each phase separately. In the first 29-year phase, mass shootings occurred every 200 days on average. In the subsequent three-year phase, mass shootings occurred every 64 days on average:

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What does the new FBI report on mass gun violence show?
In late September, the FBI released a study showing an increase in the frequency of “active shooter” cases between 2000 and 2013. The FBI analyzed 160 cases, which it defined as any incident in which shooters are “actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people” in a public place, regardless of the number of casualties. Our analysis of the FBI’s data using the SPC method corroborates the FBI’s findings that “active shooter” incidents have become more frequent.

Our analysis further reveals that the FBI data overlaps closely with the Mother Jones data. The FBI’s data set contains 44 cases in which four or more people were murdered; as the chart below shows, the process underlying this set of events shifted between late 2011 and early 2012, with mass shootings occurring more frequently since.

The FBI and Mother Jones used similar criteria. Both studies excluded mass killings in private homes related to domestic violence as well as attacks stemming from drug and gang-related activity, and both included certain attacks involving more than one shooter. The discovery methods for collecting data differed to some degree, with the FBI using various law enforcement records and reports in addition to media reports, which were the main source of the Mother Jones data. That the results of the two studies are so similar reinforces our finding that public mass shootings have increased.

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So mass shootings have become more frequent. What now?
Though we now know that public mass shootings have been occurring more often, the reasons why have yet to be identified. However we come to understand the complex factors that drive these events, it is unlikely that this recent shift is the result of social and cultural factors that have remained relatively constant over the past decade—such as the prevalence of mental illness. While many mass shooters had mental health problems, as the Mother Jones data shows, there is no reason to believe that there has been an increase in mental illness rates in the last several years that could help explain the rise in mass shootings. (In fact, federal research on the prevalence of severe mental illness shows a decrease in recent years.) As we search for answers with the common goal of diminishing mass shootings, studying them effectively remains key, not least for gauging the success of any policies aimed at reducing the frequency and toll of these events.

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Rate of Mass Shootings Has Tripled Since 2011, Harvard Research Shows

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Mark Zuckerberg Just Donated $25 Million to Fight Ebola

by JessikaSegura Posted on October 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have donated $25 million to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to help combat the Ebola crisis, which has killed more than 4,400 people in West Africa. Zuckerberg announced the nice chunk of cash via his Facebook on Tuesday:

(function(d, s, id) var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)0; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = “//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1”; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); (document, ‘script’, ‘facebook-jssdk’));
Post by Mark Zuckerberg.

Scaremongers in Congress and the media have Americans in a tizzy about Ebola: Nearly two-third of Americans now fear the virus will soon infect them or or someone they know. Although Zuckerberg’s donation won’t do much to quell the the panic, it’s certainly a nice response to recent criticism that Silicon Valley types have done little-to-nothing to combat the ongoing public health crisis.

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Mark Zuckerberg Just Donated $25 Million to Fight Ebola

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Red Dawn: The GOP’s Growing Monopoly on State Government

by pitery Posted on October 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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There’s never been a worse time to be a Democrat in a red state. Republicans now hold all the reins of power—the governorship and both houses of the state legislature—in 23 states. That’s up from just nine before the 2010 elections. There are now more states under single-party control than at any time since 1944. And without even token Democratic opposition, Republicans have busted unions in Michigan and Wisconsin, passed draconian tax cuts in Kansas, and enacted sweeping new abortion restrictions across the nation.

This November, more Americans could find themselves living under single-party GOP rule. There won’t be nearly as many states flipping to single-party rule as in 2010’s GOP romp, but Republicans are hoping to add Arkansas and Iowa to the list of states where they can implement their agenda free of Democratic resistance. In Arkansas, Republicans won the state House and Senate in 2012 and hope to add the governorship this year. And in Iowa, a razor-thin two-seat Democratic Senate majority is all that has held back a wave of conservative legislation.

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Red Dawn: The GOP’s Growing Monopoly on State Government

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Photos: This Year’s Strongest Typhoon Pounds Japan

by ElsaConnelly Posted on October 13, 2014

Mother Jones

Typhoon Vongfong—the word means “wasp” in Cantonese—brought torrential rain and damaging winds to Japan overnight, as it continued its northward trajectory across the Japanese islands. The powerful storm arrived just a week after Japan was hit by another typhoon, Phanfone, which took the lives of three US airman off Okinawa, a southern Japanese island where the US maintains a large military base. Last week, Vongfong became the strongest cyclone system observed all year, anywhere in the world—equivalent to a category 5 hurricane. It was downgraded to a tropical storm as it hit the Japanese island of Kyushu. The Japan Times is reporting that the storm has left at least 61 people injured and one missing, with hundreds of thousands advised to evacuate. Authorities took steps to protect the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, the site of the 2011 meltdown.

Here are some photos of the storm as it moved through northeast Asia:

The storm created powerful waves in Wenling, in the coastal Chinese province of Zhejiang, on Sunday, drawing thrill-seeking crowds Whitehotpix/ZUMA

Not exactly the safest place to attempt a selfie. Whitehotpix/ZUMA

The view of the storm from the International Space Station last Thursday reveals its enormity. It was downgraded to a tropical storm as it made land fall in Japan. Alexander Gerst/NASA

A huge tree upended by Vongfong’s force on the coast of Setouchi, Kagoshima, on Sunday October 12. While the storm has been downgraded, it has increased in size, and still contains a huge amount of moisture. The Yomiuri Shimbun/AP

Waves pound the coast in the city of Kochi on the Japanese island of Shikoku on Monday October 13, 2014. The storm grounded 300 flights. Kyodo/AP

This photo of the super typhoon last week showed the eye of the storm was approximately 50 miles wide. NOAA/NASA

Streets were (almost) empty and shops shuttered in Toyko as Vongfong approached last night. The storm is expected to pass over the capital on Tuesday. kodomut/Flickr

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Photos: This Year’s Strongest Typhoon Pounds Japan

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While You Procrastinate on Facebook, More Than Half the World Still Doesn’t Have Internet Access

by WaylonODowd Posted on October 13, 2014

Mother Jones

If you’re an American office worker who sleeps next to a smartphone and deals with an average of 120 work emails a day, life without the internet may seem like a quaint memory. But you’re actually in the minority: According to a new report, more than 60 percent of the world’s population hasn’t accessed the internet in the past 12 months. And those without access are disproportionately rural, low income, elderly, illiterate, and female.

Since 2004, 1.8 billion people have joined the online community, bringing total internet users to 2.7 billion. Even as new users continue to join the online ranks, however, the rate at which they join is slowing. The McKinsey & Company report projects that less than 1 million additional users will be added by 2017, leaving up to 4.2 billion people—more than half the forecasted world population—on the other side of the digital divide.

The share of the global population with access (defined as having used the internet in the preceding 12 months) grew sharply from 2004 to 2009, but less so from 2009 through 2011, and even less growth is projected from 2013 to 2017:

The specific trends that drove people online over the past decade (such as urbanization, cheaper smartphones, and the internet’s increased utility) likely won’t be enough to push the remaining population online, thanks to barriers like low incomes and lack of infrastructure.

“Those who do not or simply cannot go online increasingly suffer from constrained prospects for economic attainment, class mobility, education, and other areas related to quality of life,” the report notes. “The voices, ideas, and contributions of the offline population can’t be heard and often can’t be made until they’re connected.”

Those left offline miss out on opportunities to connect socially, access information on everything from health to the weather, and take advantage of online government services. The internet allows communities to participate in political movements like the Arab Spring and mobilize aid following natural disasters. Online access also increases government transparency, helps shoppers save time and money, lowers the barriers of entry for businesses, and of course, provides entertainment.

Beyond individuals, whole countries are left behind: An earlier McKinsey report found that from 2006 to 2011, the internet accounted for 21 percent of GDP growth in nations with stable populations and slowing economic growth. And global connectivity can lead to improvements in technology, education, democracy, and tourism.

The disadvantages of being left behind in a digital world fall disproportionately on certain communities: A full 74 percent of today’s offline population resides in just 20 countries. Even within these nations, those who lack internet access often fit similar profiles.

The report outlines four major barriers to internet access:

Incentives: Many people lack awareness of online capabilities: In 2011, 21 percent of those surveyed in Ethiopia’s capital did not know what the internet was. Even those who know of its existence might not find relevant local information or even material in their own language. The World Bank reports that 80 percent of all internet content is written in one of just 10 languages. There is also decreased incentive to use the internet in countries with limited online freedom or information security, like Iran or Nigeria.

Low incomes and affordability: Internet access is expensive in rural areas. In Ethiopia, a country with an annual per capita income of just $470, a smartphone retails for $377.

User capability: Many people throughout the world have never been educated on the internet and how to use it. Some are held back by the even more basic barrier of illiteracy.

Infrastructure: In parts of the world, there is simply no mobile internet coverage or network access. In fact, 24 percent of sub-Saharan Africans and 20 percent of Southeast Asians lack even basic electricity. The McKinsey report cites an initiative to extend broadband access to a shared community space in every village and city in Colombia over the next several years, but notes this type of project “requires substantial investment in infrastructure and is cost-prohibitive to build out in many developing markets.”

Although the United States scored high on incentives and user capability, a chunk of the population remains offline due to affordability and infrastructure. Only 77 percent of US adults with household incomes below $30,000 go online, and World Economic Forum ranked the US 35th in the world in regard to internet bandwidth. Of the 50 million offline Americans, 80 percent are low income, 54 percent are seniors, and a full 66 percent are female.

The authors report that over the past decade, growth in online population has been driven by mobile coverage expansion, urbanization, cheaper phones and data plans, a growing middle class, and the internet’s increasing utility. But they caution that the remaining offline population is unlikely to be swayed by these advantages, unless the four barriers above are addressed. “Without a significant change in technology, in income growth or in the economics of access, or in policies to spur internet adoption, the rate of growth of internet penetration will continue to slow.”

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While You Procrastinate on Facebook, More Than Half the World Still Doesn’t Have Internet Access

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Who Makes Those Top 40 Piano Covers You Hear on American Airlines? We Found Out

by JeannieHeberlin Posted on October 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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If you’ve been on an American Airlines flight in the last few years, you may have noticed that the airline pipes in piano renditions of popular songs pre-takeoff and post-landing. “We typically offer slower piano music during the boarding process and more upbeat piano music upon arrival,” notes an airline spokesman. Interestingly, American is one of the few domestic airlines that play any music at all—much less these somewhat Muzak-y offerings.

Most of these covers were produced by a Minneapolis-based group called the Piano Tribute Players. According to their group’s website, they are “a diverse group of talented musicians devoted to transforming the music of rock and pop’s biggest acts of the past and present into unique piano arrangements.” To say that they are prolific would be an understatement: The Players have produced hundreds of tribute albums, spanning all eras and genres. It is, without doubt, the only group that has covered both Lil’ Wayne and the soundtrack to “Rent.”

It turns out that their covers, which run the gamut of Top 40 past and present, are the subject of contentious and often snarky debate among some of the airline’s regular passengers—there is a long thread devoted to the subject on FlyerTalk, a popular travel site. Here are a few of their thoughts, along with some tracks that have been in heavy rotation on American flights recently.

“The AA piano rips are dreadful. The worst one, from a mire of inadequacy, is OneRepublic’s ‘If I Lose Myself,’ truly horrific and I simply can’t believe the lead singer would have authorized his work to be massacred in this fashion.” —corporate-wage-slave

“I did not enjoy hearing “Blurred Lines,” by Robin Thicke. “What a crappy song to choose!” —FriendlySkies

“I really despise the music. Classical would be much nicer. The piano covers are actually very depressing.” —jmc1K

“Both times deplaning I heard “Lights” by Ellie Goulding. Could not figure out why, but it was a nice soothing touch after a long flight.” —dadaluma83

“I like the music…Guess I’m in the minority.” —jaimelannister

OneRepublic and Blink-182 did not respond to my requests for comment.

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Who Makes Those Top 40 Piano Covers You Hear on American Airlines? We Found Out

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Scott Walker Wants to Totally Outlaw Abortion. In This Sneaky New Ad, He Pretends He Doesn’t.

by VTONorrisxiukx Posted on October 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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In one of the nation’s most hotly contested campaigns, incumbent GOP Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has recently been slammed by a new ad blitz highlighting his staunch opposition to abortion rights. He and his campaign consultants are obviously worried about this line of attack: On Monday, they issued one of the slyest ads of the campaign season. Titled “Decision,” the ad attempts to depict Walker as a reasonable fellow on this issue. It’s a brazenly misleading spot—almost a flip-flop—that is designed to create the false impression that Walker respects a woman’s right to choose. The ad is camouflage for the fact that Walker has supported outlawing all abortions, even in cases of rape of incest.

In the ad (seen above), Walker, talking straight into the camera, starts off by saying, “I’m pro-life.” He then defends the bill he he signed in 2013 that required women seeking abortions to first obtain an ultrasound and that required abortion providers to possess admitting rights at a hospital within 30 miles of their clinic. This law—which remains tangled in legal challenges—could greatly restrict abortion access in Wisconsin. But in the ad, Walker characterizes the legislation as a measure “to increase safety and to provide more information for a woman considering her options.” Then comes the whopper: “The bill leaves the final decision to a woman and her doctor.” With that statement, a viewer could easily conclude that Walker is personally opposed to abortion but supports the right of a woman to decide (in consultation with a doctor) to choose an abortion.

But Walker is as hard-core on abortion as a conservative anti-choice politician can be. In 2010, he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editorial board that he wants to ban abortion entirely—no exceptions for rape or incest. Here’s that exchange:

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: You oppose abortion even in cases of rape and incest.

Scott Walker: (Nods)

MJS: Tell me if I got that right.

SW: That’s correct.

For some reason, Walker neglects to mention this absolutist stance in his new ad. The ad is a clear sign that Walker and his strategists believe that this position won’t help him get reelected and that his best shot at winning depends on the most sophisticated of campaign craftiness.

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Scott Walker Wants to Totally Outlaw Abortion. In This Sneaky New Ad, He Pretends He Doesn’t.

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