* Salon…

If you want to get a real first-hand look at gang culture in Chicago’s South Side, all you need to do is scroll through the Twitter feed of Gahrika Barnes.

The 17-year-old was a known member of the Gangster Disciples, a gang in the Woodlawn neighborhood, who’s suspected by police in multiple shootings.

Under the alias @TyquanAssassin, Barnes tweeted over 27,000 times to her 2,700 followers: boasting about her gang affiliation, posting messages of grief over friends who had been shot by rival gangs and threatening retaliation, and taunting the police. She describes herself in her bio as a “PAID SHOOTA.”

She was murdered on Eberhart Street, mere hours after tweeting the address of her current hangout.

The article goes on to talk about an effort by researches and activists to stop these social media fights from escalating into real life shooting wars. You should definitely read it all.

* And then…

As one of the few researchers in this field, [Dr. Desmond Patton, an associate professor at Columbia University in New York and one of the few academics looking into the language of gang members online] dominates the literature, most of which has been published this year. His January article in the academic journal Computers in Human Behavior, titled “Internet banging: New trends in social media, gang violence, masculinity and hip hop,” identified historical and cultural threads that have led to the intersection between social media and gang culture.

For starters, he notes the “relative low cost of smartphones, emergence of social media and SNSs, and increased technological literacy” has led to influx of tech-savvy teens. At the same time, Patton and his co-authors link urban growth and economic disenfranchisement to the rise in gang violence. They argue that the loss of factory jobs in urban areas “affected masculine identity profoundly. Almost overnight, many blue-collar men who embodied the American work ethic became unemployed and disenfranchised, severely damaging many urban men’s self images and representing an identity shift.”

Indeed, since 2000, America has lost over 5 million factory jobs. These losses have directly impacted the Rust Belt, America’s so-called manufacturing heartland, of which Chicago once reigned supreme. Yet, due to many factors including increased automation, free-trade agreements and the transfer of manufacturing plants, factory jobs have been on a slow decline since the 1980s and have, in part, contributed to the poverty of Chicago’s neighborhoods. A New York Times article from May of this year draws a link between the poverty in Chicago’s racially segregated neighborhoods and a lack of affordable housing to the rise in Chicago’s gang-related crime.

* And just as a reminder, here’s an excerpt from Greg Baise’s recent City Club address…

Just remember as you leave, in the last seven years….

Wisconsin created 44,100 manufacturing jobs
Ohio created 75,900 manufacturing jobs
Indiana created 83,700 manufacturing jobs and
Michigan created 171,300 manufacturing jobs.

Illinois created 4,600 jobs. Even Idaho created 9,100 manufacturing jobs. A state better known for its potato farms.

Can we “create” manufacturing jobs? Not really. I mean, we can hand out subsidies that could spark a few new jobs. But what we really need to do is make this state a less challenging place to start and grow businesses, including factories.

* Last weekend, I drove to Remington, Indiana for my uncle’s funeral. The road I took isn’t far from Watseka, which is a former home to several of my cousins and used to be a haven for factory jobs (Baise’s own parents emigrated there from Kentucky in the 1930s for the jobs). It’s now a sad shell of its former self.

The road then meanders through some little Illinois towns that are almost dead. Once you cross the border into Indiana, however, you almost immediately see small factories and far more prosperous little towns. The contrast is stark - and depressing for an Illinoisan.

You can scream all you want about Gov. Rauner’s Turnaround Agenda, and I’ll agree with much of it. But the bottom line is he ain’t wrong about our business climate. Holding the budget hostage is wrong. Plain and simple. But so is refusing to address a frightening problem with our state.

For once, I’d like to see the Democrats step up and offer a plan. Blaming China and Mexico is all well and good, but the fact that more manufacturing jobs are being created in Idaho than Illinois makes me sick to my stomach. Enough with the excuses.