Jim Moran’s Blog

Top Social Media Sites (ranked by unique worldwide visitors November, 2008; comScore)

1. Blogger (222 million)

2. Facebook (200 million)

3. MySpace (126 million)

4. Wordpress (114 million)

5. Windows Live Spaces (87 million)

6. Yahoo Geocities (69 million)

7. Flickr (64 million)

8. hi5 (58 million)

9. Orkut (46 million)

10. Six Apart (46 million)

11. Baidu Space (40 million)

12. Friendster (31 million)

13. 56.com (29 million)

14. Webs.com (24 million)

15. Bebo (24 million)

16. Scribd (23 million)

17. Lycos Tripod (23 million)

18. Tagged (22 million)

19. imeem (22 million)

20. Netlog (21 million)

TechCrunch: Top Social Media Sites of 2008 (Facebook Still Rising).

The statistics are terrifying.

Two hundred million Americans are overweight and 100 million are obese. More than 75 million Americans have high blood pressure. 24 million people are diabetic. Heart disease remains the No. 1 cause of death for men and women, followed by stroke and obesity-related cancers. Obesity has overtaken tobacco as the No. 1 cause of preventable deaths in the United States.

Over 50% of bankruptcies are caused by what has become known as “medical debt.”

Fast food, fast medicine, fast news and fast lives have turned many Americans into a sick, uninformed, indebted, “processed” people.

Processed People features insightful interviews from nine preeminent health and environmental experts/advocates. They discuss how and why Americans got into this mess, and what we can do to break the “processed people” cycle.

Processed People: The Documentary.

May you all have a Happy and Healthy New Year.!

As the financial meltdown reaches historic proportions, free-market fundamentalism, or neoliberalism as it is called in some quarters, is losing both its claim to legitimacy and its claims on democracy. Once upon a time a perceived bastion of liberal democracy, the social state is being recalled from exile, as the decades-long conservative campaign against the alleged abuses of “big government” - its euphemism for a form of governance that assumed a measure of responsibility for the education, health and general welfare of its citizens - has been widely discredited. Not only have the starving and drowning efforts of the Right been revealed in all their malicious cruelty, but government is about to have a Cinderella moment; it is about to become “cool,” as Prince Charming-elect Barack Obama famously put it.

t r u t h o u t | Education After Neoliberalism.

There is something approaching a consensus that the Paulson Plan — also known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP — was a boondoggle of an intervention that’s flailed from one approach to the next, with little oversight and less effect on the financial meltdown.

But perhaps even more troubling than the ad hoc nature of its implementation is the suspicion that has recently emerged that TARP — hundreds of billions of dollars worth so far — was sold to Congress and the public based on a Big Lie.

t r u t h o u t | Was the “Credit Crunch” a Myth Used to Sell a Trillion-Dollar Scam?.

Amnesty International has said that industry claims that Taser stun guns are safe and non-lethal do not stand up to scrutiny. The organization called on governments to limit their deployment to life-threatening situations or to suspend their use.

The call came as the organization released one of the most detailed reports to date on the safety of the stun gun. The report “USA: Less than lethal?” is being published as the number of people who died after being struck by Tasers in the USA reached 334 between 2001 and August 2008.

Tasers – potentially lethal and easy to abuse | Amnesty International.

He didn’t know what they wanted, but obeyed when they told him to approach slowly. “I then had this incredible jolt of pain on the back of my head,” he explains. The electricity made him spasm; as he fell to the ground, he felt his teeth scatter on the tarmac and his bowels open. “Then they shot me again in the head. I can’t describe the pain.” (Another victim says it is “like someone reached into my body to rip my muscles apart with a fork.”) The police then saw he was not the person they were looking for, said he was free to go, and drove off.

Hullabaloo.

Interphone researchers are conducting the largest-ever study investigating if cellphones cause cancer, examining studies from 6,400 tumors in patients from 13 countries. Final results are expected in early 2009, but the preliminary ones are badbadbad.

Cellphones: Early Results from Largest Ever Cellphone Cancer Study Are Horribly Depressing.

There are over 27,000 free books in the Project Gutenberg Online Book Catalog.

A grand total of over 100,000 titles are available at Project Gutenberg Partners, Affiliates and Resources.

If you don’t live in the United States, please check the copyright laws of your country before downloading or redistributing a book.

Main Page - Gutenberg.

New York faces a projected budget deficit of $15 billion in 2009-2010. Any solution will require shared sacrifice and cuts to popular programs, but working families shouldn’t bear the burden alone. Real shared sacrifice will require not just cuts, but Fair Share Tax Reform, which asks the wealthiest New Yorkers to pitch in and shoulder a reasonable share of the budget burden.

Tax Cuts for the Wealthiest New Yorkers Result in $8 billion in Lost State Revenue Each Year

Over the last 30 years, New York has reduced income tax rates on the wealthiest New Yorkers by more than 50%. Since high income tax brackets have been eliminated, working class families and the very rich now pay the same rate. These changes have resulted in a loss of $8 billion in state revenue a year.

Fair Share Tax Reform | The Plan.