Month: May 2011

How time flies. I just wanted to thank everyone here for their support and kindness and talent. And it's very heartening to see the Atlantic's unique visitors hold up without the Dish.

More to the point, it's been great to see the Beast take flight this past month with us now part of the team, with traffic now double what it was a year ago.

Yes, the capture of OBL obviously sent us through the traffic roof these past two days (Sitemeter shows around 600,000 pageviews for the Dish on May 2 alone). But the entire month of April was a pageview boom for the Beast, as you can see from Quantcast's account graphed above. We're proud to be a small, new part of that success. Sitemeter shows our traffic as pretty much unchanged from its average this past year or so, if you discount the very recent news-related surge, at around 6 million pageviews a month. Internal Beast numbers show those pageviews came from 1 million unique visitors over a thirty day period, our solid, devoted readership for the past year or two.

Thanks for coming with us. We've never been happier than here.

Mark Zuckerberg recently remarked that he’s “cool” with raising taxes on the rich – himself included. Gary Rivlin finds this disingenuous:

It’s a hollow gesture to say the federal government should raise the tax rate on the country’s top wage earners when the likes of Zuckerberg have most of their wealth tied up in stock. Many of the super-rich see virtually all their income as capital gains, and capital gains are taxed at a much lower rate—15 percent—than ordinary income. When Warren Buffett talks about paying a lower tax rate than his secretary, that’s because she sees most of her pay through a paycheck, while the bulk of his compensation comes in the form of capital gains and dividends. In 2006, for instance, Buffett paid 17.7 percent in taxes on the $46 million he booked that year, while his secretary lost 30 percent of her $60,000 salary to the government.

“It’s easy to say ‘Raise taxes’ when you know you’re not going to have to pay those taxes,” [Bruce] Bartlett says. “What I don’t hear is ‘Let’s raise the capital-gains tax.’”

His repeal of the emergency law was obviously a farce:

Human rights groups say hundreds of ordinary Syrians have been jailed for "degrading the prestige of the state" amid an intensifying crackdown on anti-government protests. Hundreds of detainees received a three-year prison sentence on Tuesday while mass arrests continue, to pre-empt further unrest on the Muslim day of prayer on Friday, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

An Al Jazeera journalist has also gone missing. The above video shows "#Syria'n soldiers been shot by Syrian regime & #Daraa people trying to rescue them". Gerg? Plankó and Bence Gáspár Tamás created a long compilation of scenes from Syria. Molly Hennessy-Fiske finds new footage:

Some of the latest video footage to emerge from Syria overnight Tuesday purportedly shows pro-democracy protesters at Aleppo University being shot at by riot police. … Protesters also posted video footage online of security forces cracking down on a candlelight vigil late Tuesday in the northeastern city of Kamishli, where police allegedly shot at protesters and arrested a photographer, confiscating his camera.

Meanwhile, the southern city of Dara, where the six-week anti-government protest movement began, remained under siege late Tuesday, protesters said, with aid organizations banned from entering to provide food or medicine as gunfire continued.

The Obama administration turns up the rhetoric by calling these "barbaric measures". The latest from EA's live-blog:

1350 GMT: Activists claim tanks are heading for the central Syrian city of Homs after anti-regime protests by about 1000 people last night.

Charles Fishman, author of The Big Thirst, advocates smarter water use:

The U.S. as a nation uses less water in 2011 than it did in 1980. We use less water to produce an economy of $13 trillion than we did to produce an (inflation-adjusted) economy of $6 trillion. That’s incredible. The country over all has doubled its water productivity — which means that it’s possible to continue to grow and modernize, while actually reducing the amount of water we use.

Werner Herzog weighs in on capital punishment, the subject of his next project:

I have only the most primitive of arguments and that is that a state under no circumstances must be entitled to kill anyone off, for any reason, period. You had tens of thousands of cases of capital punishment under the Nazis, you had a systematic program for exterminating schizophrenics in the euthanasia program, and you had a state-sponsored, organized, monumental crime in the Holocaust, killing 6 million people. Language doesn't have an adequate word to describe this monstrosity. For me, there's no debate. However, America has not had this experience.

Yglesias passes along the above graph of unemployment rates across education groups (Ages 25+) from the St. Louis Fed. It nicely illustrates this Economist article:

The decline of the working American man has been most marked among the less educated and blacks. If you adjust official data to include men in prison or the armed forces (who are left out of the raw numbers), around 35% of 25- to 54-year-old men with no high-school diploma have no job, up from around 10% in the 1960s. Of those who finished high school but did not go to college, the fraction without work has climbed from below 5% in the 1960s to almost 25% … Among blacks, more than 30% overall and almost 70% of high-school dropouts have no job.

Ryan Avent adds his two cents.

Tom Jacobs summarizes Jenna Jordan's 2009 paper (pdf) in the journal Security Studies, which studied assassination attempts on the heads of terrorist organizations between 1945 and 2004:

The results hardly suggest leadership removal hastens a group’s demise. Fifty-three percent of the terrorist organizations that suffered such a violent leadership loss fell apart — which sounds impressive until you discover that 70 percent of groups who did not deal with an assassination no longer exist. Further crunching of the numbers revealed that leadership decapitation becomes more counterproductive the older the group is.

But Matt Dickenson's research predicts "no significant backlash against citizens in the continental US" in the coming months:

The primary finding that I explore in my paper is that violence seems to decrease after the removal of Tier One leaders and increase after the removal of midlevel leaders. The possible causal mechanisms for this are explained in the paper.

Neuroscientist David Eagleman tested people's ability to keep a steady beat. He found the control section, or the average person "wavered by an average of thirty-five milliseconds; the best drummer was off by less than ten." Burkhard Bilger considers the brain's sense of time:

What would it be like to have a drummer’s timing? I wondered. Would you hear the hidden rhythms of everyday life, the syncopations of the street? When I asked the players at Eno’s studio this, they seemed to find their ability as much an annoyance as a gift. Like perfect pitch, which dooms the possessor to hear every false note and flat car horn, perfect timing may just make a drummer more sensitive to the world’s arrhythmias and repeated patterns, Eagleman said—to the flicker of computer screens and fluorescent lights. Reality, stripped of an extra beat in which the brain orchestrates its signals, isn’t necessarily a livelier place. It’s just filled with badly dubbed television shows.

Meet Richard and John: