Lenny Kravitz – Fly Away
I don’t know why this tune is so catchy. Maybe it is the “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah’s.” Maybe it’s the simple harmony. All I know is that you tend to sing it for about four hours after you hear it. Lenny Kravitz. Fly Away.
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Save Soapblox
I read about this the other day and got sick to my stomach. This is the kind of crap that some people think is funny? Or maybe it was a deliberate attempt to wipe out several liberal blogs all at once. If the heat is too hot, burn down the kitchen? That seems to the philosophy of some hackers. Let’s fight back.
From DailyKos (I just sent some money.):
You know how some politicians are fond of saying “you can’t solve a problem by just throwing money at it.” Well, here is a problem you can solve by throwing money at it. Send in a contribution to save Soapblox now!.
Why is Soapblox Important?
Soapblox is an inexpensive, community-building content management platform developed by Paul Preston and currently used by over 100 progressive blogs. For only $15 / month, Soapblox has offered most of the features available on sites like Daily Kos and MyDD: user diaries, recommended diaries, promoted diaries, interactive comments, comment ratings, tip jars, and even things like quick hits. It is a lot of functionality for not much price, making it ideal for independent, progressive, grassroots media. As such, it has been adopted by about 90% of the fifty-state blog network, and also by several national sites including Pam’s House Blend, My Left Wing, Swing State Project, and my own Open Left. Collectively, the blogs on Soapblox received over 50,000,000 page views in 2008, and provided a huge percentage of the state-level, local politics coverage in the progressive blogosphere.
Why Is Soapblox in Danger?
On Wednesday morning, Soapblox was hacked to within an inch of its life. A quarter of all Soapblox sites went completely offline, and their databases were gone. Most others were threatened, as My Left Wing and Open Left temporarily lost all of their diaries. The hackers were in so deep, that Paul temporarily threw in the towel and declared defeat. Dozens of bloggers that I knew were all frantically emailing each other. Desperate attempts were made to try and copy all of our data before The End. At one point I was, literally, running up and down the stairs in my apartment building freaking out, as there are few things I fear more than my website’s content being wiped out. It was an impending blog apocalypse, where the entire archive and operation of over 100 blogs were almost wiped off the Internet with no hope of return.
As the day went on, through a lot of effort Soapblox was able to fend off the attack, save all data, and restore full service. However, the threat remains. [Read more →]
What does the number 524,000 mean to you?
524,000. That’s a big number. In the month of December, 524,000 Americans lost their jobs. Over the past year, 2.6 million Americans have lost their jobs. Jobs were lost both in manufacturing and service sectors. Both November’s and October’s numbers were revised downward.
1.5 million jobs were lost in the last quarter of 2008. The unemployment rate is now 7.2%. 11.1 million Americans are unemployed. Underemployment, a much better gauge of job market weakness, has risen to 13.5%. This is an increase of 4.8 percentage points over December of 2007. When you combine the number of people who are out of work or underemployed, you come up with a whopping total of 21 million Americans.
By now, it should be clear to anyone and everyone that the policies of the Bush administration have been disastrous for our country. The Economic Policy Institute has more on the jobs picture.
Joe the Plumber to Cover War
For reasons that are 100% unclear to me, someone has hired Samuel Wurzelbacher to cover the war in Gaza. No, really.
From AP:
Joe The Plumber is putting down his wrenches and picking up a reporter’s notebook.
The Ohio man who became a household name during the presidential campaign says he is heading to Israel as a war correspondent for the conservative Web site pjtv.com.
Samuel J. Wurzelbacher says he’ll spend 10 days covering the fighting. (more… )
Jon Stewart and the Daily Show has more. Watch the whole clip, including Joe the Plumber’s answer as to how he will be protected while covering the war.
Smart men do it with knowledge
Smart men do it with knowledge. I always wanted to make that into a bumper sticker. 
This was just my opinion since I like to think of myself as a smart guy. Now there is proof.
From LiveScience:
Smart men rejoice:
Turns out that intelligent people are generally healthier than their less-clever peers – studies have shown that brainiacs are, for instance, less likely to suffer from heart disease and Alzheimer’s. Scientists have suggested that smart people may score less stressful jobs in safer places and that they may make better lifestyle choices, for instance by exercising more and eating better. In other words, maybe bright people actually listen to the Surgeon General.
But these newest findings, to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Intelligence, found that negative habits had little effect on sperm quality, so they don’t support that theory.
The researchers instead speculate that intelligence might be passed down as part of a larger package of good attributes. One gene can influence multiple traits, so the genes involved in smarts may somehow improve sperm quality – and perhaps other characteristics as well. (more… )
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Errington C. Thompson, MD, is a surgeon, scholar, full-time sports fan and part-time political activist. He is active in a number of community projects and initiatives. Through medicine, he strives to improve the physical health of all he treats...
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