R.E.M. Breaks Up: Michael Stipe, Bandmates Release Ends Run
"To our Fans and Friends: As R.E.M., and as lifelong friends and co-conspirators, we have decided to call it a day as a band. We walk away with a great sense of gratitude, of finality, and of astonishment at all we have accomplished. To anyone who ever felt touched by our music, our deepest thanks for listening." R.E.M.
Formed in 1980 in Athens, Georgia, the band became alt-rock icons and were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2007. The group was comprised of lead man Michael Stipe, bassist Mike Mills, guitarist Peter Buck and drummer Bill Berry; Berry left the band in 1997, leading to the near dissolution of the group while recording the album that followed
A coup of tabloid headline writing, from the UK rag The Sunday Sport. The backstory, from BuzzFeed:
Percy Foster was a 3-foot-6-inch dwarf who starred in the UK porno “Hi-Ho Hi-Ho, It's Up Your Arse We Go.” He bore an uncanny resemblance to celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay. Welsh agriculture officials discovered Foster's body in an underground chamber
The Deglon Meeting Knife, designed by Mia Schmallenbach, is a set of sculptural, nested knives (priced, alas, as sculptures, at $600 for the set). The proportions of the four nested knives -- paring knife, carving knife, chef’s knife and filleting knife -- are "determined by the Fibonacci sequence with as its base the average width of a hand."
Perry won his first Texas stateside race buy running against a law that made farmers remove workers in fields before spraying pesticides. (really?, won?)
While in the Texas legislature he wore his jeans so tight his nickname was crotch (crotch? really?)
Paul Spinrad snapped this photo at Maker Faire NY. He writes, "A cyclist rides a tall bike with a short wheelbase and tiny wheels that provide minimal gyroscopic balancing effect. The bike was built by William Thomas Porter of Brooklyn." Check out other snapshots of Make Faire (happening this weekend) at Maker Faire Daily.
Bill Maher and Keith Olberman proceeded to shout different things at Bob, such as the fact that taxes are at their lowest level in 50 years, or that Ronald Reagan raised taxes. A peek inside the bubble revealed that Bob was only hearing elevator music, not his two increasingly harried hosts.
Olbermann eventually called Bob an "information-free, bleach-drinking halfwit," before shouting, "wrestling is fake!" to end the show.
Astronaut Ron Garan takes photos in space and posts them to Google+. This photo was taken yesterday, aboard the ISS, and shows the Southern Lights.
Real-time astronaut photos may be my favorite benefit of social media
Republicans who fall for the arch-conservative Texas governor don’t seem to understand that supporting Perry is the surest way to reelect Obama, argues Meghan McCain.
When the initial buzz about Rick Perry started getting louder and louder this summer, I asked a friend of mine, who is a longtime veteran of Republican politics, what I should expect from the Texas governor who was trying to become our party's next nominee for president. The response was quick and to the point: “Rick Perry is George Bush on crack, just wait.” So far, I don't necessarily agree that Rick Perry is George Bush on crack, but he could definitely be described as George Bush 2.0. He is also a phenomenon that has quickly attracted intense interest and high poll numbers that continue to climb (he is currently, in most polls, the Republican frontrunner). All of it, I quite frankly do not understand. I feel like a character in “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” but instead of pointing out that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes, I am pointing out that this person is in every way unelectable on a national scale.
Who exactly are we kidding here? Do we really think possibly nominating George Bush 2.0 is going to fly with independents in a post-Obama era? Why as Republicans are we are more concerned with retaining our moral high ground in picking a candidate who hits every qualification of a “true conservative” litmus test than thinking about the national stage of a general election? Why do we still, after all this time, and in all the ways that the world is changing, continue to put a politician front and center who has very little crossover appeal?
Many conservative bloggers and pundits accuse me and people like me of being bastard Republicans, the unwanted moderate Republicans within the party. As if being a moderate Republican is some kind of freak mutation from the original conservative design. Well, here’s a little reality check. We will need moderate Republicans, we will need independents, and we will need blue-dog Democrats to win 2012 and unseat Obama. There is no media strategist anywhere who would debate that fact. So why nominate someone who will only alienate the very people that will help get a Republican president back into office? I have never understood this and I never will.
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The Republican debate this week is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Governor Perry. On his mandate that 11- and 12-year-old girls in the state of Texas be vaccinated for the human papilloma virus, there are already questions regarding campaign donations from Merck lobbyists to the governor's campaign. Among the litany of things that could be listed to showcase Perry’s extreme views, his comments that Social Security is nothing more than a “Ponzi scheme that cannot be sustained” is reactive. Most people can agree that Social Security needs reforming, but to compare Social Security to something that Bernie Madoff used to rip off the retirement funds of thousands of people is sensationalistic and inaccurate.
It’s as if Rick Perry is running a west Texas campaign on a national level. Yes, a west Texas campaign will get you attention and the support of right-wing Tea Partiers but will hurt nearly every other voter demographic. Last spring, Perry held a Texas prayer and fasting rally to pray for rain and has been quoted saying that “anyone that doesn’t accept Jesus as their savior is going to hell.” How well do we think this is going to play in the battleground state of Florida with its large Jewish population (or with anyone who isn’t a Christian)? These are just a few small examples of his polarization, and as the election season continues, I'm sure we'll see even more examples.
Why nominate someone who will only alienate the very people that will help get a Republican president back into office?
Rick Perry is not my candidate, Rick Perry has never been my candidate. Even what little scandal that has filtered out is enough to make me question his judgment and ethics as a politician. Republicans are already battling a double standard when it comes to media coverage. The media will microscopically analyze and crucify whomever we nominate far more intensely than any Democrat. We can’t afford to nominate someone who doesn’t retain mass crossover appeal or can’t survive under a media inquisition tidal wave that hasn’t even crested yet.
I spent almost two years trying to get my father elected president. The notion that we as a party are going to nominate the most conservative candidate simply to prove some kind of ideological point about extreme conservatism, instead of looking at the broader picture concerning the general election, is suicide. At some point, we are going to have to ask ourselves if this is about nominating a candidate who one small faction of the party thinks is right or about nominating the person who is going to bring us to the White House. Why choose to prove points within the party instead of concentrating on beating Obama? More than anything in my life right now, I want to see a Republican unseat Obama. I am scared of what will happen to this country if Obama is reelected, and I am equally scared about what will happen to my party if we nominate the wrong person. This is a fear that is common among the moderate faction of the party, and I just don’t know what kind of options we are going to be left with if the choice this next election cycle is Obama v. Perry 2012. I want Obama to be a one-term president, and nominating Rick Perry would guarantee that will not happen.
Well, I gather that a lot of right-wingers are quoting selectively from a piece I wrote 15 years ago in the Boston Review, in which I said that Social Security had a “Ponzi game aspect.” As always, you should read what I actually wrote. Here’s the passage:
Social Security is structured from the point of view of the recipients as if it were an ordinary retirement plan: what you get out depends on what you put in. So it does not look like a redistributionist scheme. In practice it has turned out to be strongly redistributionist, but only because of its Ponzi game aspect, in which each generation takes more out than it put in. Well, the Ponzi game will soon be over, thanks to changing demographics, so that the typical recipient henceforth will get only about as much as he or she put in (and today’s young may well get less than they put in).
Notice what I didn’t say. I didn’t say that the system was a fraud; I didn’t say that it would collapse. I said that in the past it had benefited from the fact that each generation paying in to the system was bigger than the generation that preceded it, and that this luxury would be ending in the years ahead.
So why did I use the P-word? Basically because Paul Samuelson had done the same; he was basically just being cute, and I was emulating him — which now turns out to be a mistake.
But anyway, anyone who uses my statement as some kind of defense of Rick Perry and all that is playing word games. I explained what I meant in that Boston Review article, and it was nothing at all like the claims that Social Security is a fraud, is destined to collapse, and all that. Social Security is and always has been mainly a pay-as-you-go system, which is nothing at all like a classic Ponzi scheme.
Of course, the usual suspects won’t pay any attention to what I’ve just said. But if anyone is actually listening
A coup of tabloid headline writing, from the UK rag The Sunday Sport. The backstory, from BuzzFeed: 
Glad you asked
