If you're feeling like the U.S. government is only picking on American humans this week, consider the wolves hunted very nearly to extinction until federal endangered species protection brought them back from the brink. As of today, wolves are on their own again.

The Obama Administration is bowing to pressure from Western ranchers and hunting groups to make it open season on the predators. Wolves are "keystone predators" that have immense effects on entire ecosystems, from the health of deer and elk populations to the ability of forests to regenerate.

AP | Government plans to end remaining gray wolf protections across most of Lower 48

Hunters and trappers already are targeting the predators in states where protections previously were lifted. They’ve killed some 1,600 wolves in the past several years in Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Minnesota and Wisconsin. Thousands more have been killed by government wildlife agents.

Ever since 9/11, the American government has been busily constructing the most comprehensive surveillance state in this country's history. This vast and invasive bureaucracy is too big to hide, but the public has done its part by politely ignoring it. No longer. Now is when we, the people, choose whether or not we will accept the end of privacy as we know it. If history is any indication, we will.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the public's consent was explicit: Do Whatever It Takes. As passions faded and the "War on Terror" morphed into a quasi-permanent state of being, our consent became implicit. The public never asked for the surveillance state to stop. Over the past decade, journalists have periodically revealed details of the breadth of our government's spying mechanism: the Washington Post cataloged the breathtaking size of the secret intelligence-industrial complex; Jane Mayer reported on NSA whistleblowers who said that the agency was vacuuming up email and phone records from all Americans. These stories, meticulous though they were, made only a temporary splash. This week's stories are different.

Over the past two days, two incredibly important stories about the U.S. government's spying capabilities broke one after another. First, the story that the NSA is collecting the phone records of all Verizon Business Services customers—which may well include all Verizon users—on a daily, ongoing basis; and then, yesterday, the existence of the PRISM program, in which the NSA and the FBI tap directly into the data streams of the world's biggest internet companies, allowing it to pull out virtually any and all communications data, allowing them to "watch your ideas form as you type." (The vague denials of the various internet companies likely hinge on the technical mechanisms of their cooperation, rather than on the existence of their cooperation itself.)

The great omniscient government spy looking over your shoulder is real. This is the type of spying program that makes conspiracy theorists sound mild in comparison. Even in the context of the wholesale erosion of the very concept of "civil liberties" since 9/11, this is sobering stuff. We have consented, without our knowledge, to giving faceless, unaccountable government representatives access to everything we say and do.

Is government cat watching you masturbate? Well, probably not, in practice. But he could be. And that is the problem. Debate over this program will likely consist of much hassling over whether or not the government is currently using all that data it collects for nefarious purposes. That misses the point. J. Edgar Hoover's FBI built dossiers on thousands of innocent Americans. Many of those files ultimately just sat around collecting dust; others were used for blackmail or other unconstitutional purposes. Either way, the primary outrage was the existence of the files themselves. Once the government has all of your information, it takes only a single immoral bureaucrat or a lax culture of oversight to put it to bad use. The Fourth Amendment— "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures"— was not passed because the British had in fact been coming into every colonist's house, but because they had reserved the right to do so without cause. Likewise, our government is now reserving the right to digitally replicate Hoover's FBI files on a much grander scale. That right itself is what must be denied.

Public outrage over these things tends to be correlated to how much faith we have in the current presidential administration. That's a mistake. Were Bush still president, Democrats would be appalled and fearful of what might be done with all their private data; as it is, Bill O'Reilly is drawing parallels to the IRS scandal and warning darkly of the government spying on conservatives. In reality, the principle is the important thing. This is only more outrageous given Barack Obama's background as a constitutional law professor, of all things. Obama certainly has personal qualms about presiding over the construction of such a vast surveillance state, but he evidently does not have the backbone to halt it, knowing that it could backfire on him politically in the case of one successful terrorist attack. “The president welcomes a discussion of the trade-offs between security and civil liberties," a White House spokesman said. That remark is disgraceful.

Consider just a few of the implications of what we now know. First, the idea that U.S. intelligence agencies only direct their efforts at foreigners is a farce. They are collecting the data of Americans and foreigners alike, and of phone calls both foreign and domestic. It is a classic example of Martin Niemoller's famous poem come to life: First they came for Al-Qaeda, and I did not speak out because I was not Al-Qaeda; Then they came for the dark-skinned foreigners, and I did not speak out because I was not a dark-skinned foreigner; Then I found out they've had access to all of my pornography searches for years now. Fuck.

Second, it is worth taking a moment to reflect on the fact that the vast majority of our most powerful elected officials knew all about this program, and have been signing off on it for years. The inherent secrecy of the surveillance state is far too powerful to be held in check by mere democracy. America, the shining beacon of liberty, collects all of its citizens' communications, with the permission of a secret court, and of elected officials who are not allowed to discuss it. Even those few Congressmen who tried to fight these programs through the proper legal channels were met with Orwellian resistance. When Sen. Ron Wyden tried to find out how many Americans had had data intercepted by the NSA, the NSA reportedly "wrote Wyden a letter stating that it would violate the privacy of Americans in NSA data banks to try to estimate their number."

Savor that, America. It is the type of delicious irony that only a terrifyingly powerful bureaucracy can provide.

There is no way for us to know what the government is doing with all of our data. It's a secret. This is why civilized societies enact laws to rein in the power of their government's spying operations— because we are granting them the enormous power of working in secret, and therefore they must operate under very strict general parameters, because we cannot know the specifics of what they are doing. A society that calls itself "free" simply cannot allow secret spies to have a peephole into everything we say and do. When it was revealed that the Justice Department had obtained phone records of reporters at the AP, there was universal outrage. I hope you didn't use it all up, because what the NSA is doing makes the AP spying look like a raindrop in the ocean. Does the NSA have access to all of our data? Yes. What will the NSA use this access for? "We can't tell you," says the NSA. Will the NSA ever abuse this power? "No," says the NSA. Well... can we be sure? "No," says the NSA. "You just have to trust us."

Trust is a poor substitute for law. Particularly when it comes to a government that's just been revealed to be operating a huge domestic spying program, in contravention of previously state aims of only spying on foreign terrorists. The government may not be reading your email— but it could be, with the push of a button. And that is the scary part. It is like being followed around by a man who holds a gun to you head but says, "Relax. I promise I'm not going to pull this trigger."

Now is when we choose whether privacy, as it has traditionally been understood, will continue to exist. That is not hyperbole. A government with cameras on every city corner and a tap on every phone is not some paranoid futurist fantasy. It is what we have now. And our government will continue to grant greater and greater power to itself, in secret, until we actively choose to make it stop. The surveillance state to which we have acquiesced is by is nature a self-expanding machine. If we do not demand that it be turned off, it will become a permanent feature of the Land of the Free.

[Image by Jim Cooke. Photo via Shutterstock]

Television producer David Simon, who made his bones fictionalizing the foibles, corruption, and inescapable humanity of the City of Baltimore's public servants, has complete and unalloyed faith in the NSA's pure intentions in hoovering your telephone data until someone proves otherwise.

On the latest episode of his popular YouTube toy review show, toy collector Hendrik Ball features four unusual toy guns he's been holding on to since the mid-80s.

Some of the guns are more unusual than others: After introducing the first gun — a "soft rubber hand gun" made in the USA by a company called Vic's Novelties — Hendrik proceeds to switch it on, only to reveal that this toy happens to be of the adult variety.

Entirely oblivious to the fact that he was now playing around with a gun-shaped dildo on a toy review program called "Stick 'em Up," Hendrik continues to describe the toy's features in unintentionally hilarious fashion.

"It does this weird action as if you're drunk or something like that," he says. "What a wonderful idea for a gun. Quite mad, but great fun."

Indeed.

After one viewer pointed out the obvious in the comments section, Hendrik said he purchased the gun from a "regular toy company back in the 1980s," adding that "sometimes a banana is just a banana."

And sometimes it's a sex toy.

[H/T: The Daily Dot]

Cameron D’Ambrosio is the Massachusetts teenager and amateur rapper who was rather outrageously charged with terroristic threats last month after referencing the Boston Marathon Bombing in lyrics he’d posted on Facebook. On Wednesday, a Grand Jury declined to indict D’Ambrosio; yesterday, the high-school senior was finally released to his family on his own personal recognizance. This was after the 18-year-old spent more than a month locked up and less than 10 days after a Massachusetts Superior Court judge denied a bail request.

The Methuen High senior was first taken into custody on May 1—in an Ol' Dirty Bastard shirt, no less—after one of his peers alerted their school’s administration that Cameron posted a status update with “disturbing verbiage” on Facebook. The school contacted the local police, who tracked down D’Ambrosio near his home, and then subsequently put out a gleeful press release suggesting that they’d captured the next Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Here’s what Cameron allegedly posted:

Police obtained a search warrant for the high-schooler's home, where they confiscated the family's XBox and laptop, but found no supporting evidence that D'Ambrosio had anything violent planned. Soon after, the Center for the Rights, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit, got involved and helped D'Ambrosio's case gain national attention with a viral petition that collected more than 90,000 signatures protesting the charges. A Grand Jury agreed and Cameron finally got to go home.

Even though the charges against D'Ambrosio have not been officially dropped, an Essex County District Attorney spokesperson told Rolling Stone the DA would not likely bring additional counts against the teenager when he appears in court on June 27.

[Center for the Rights / Rolling Stone // photos l-r via Center for the Rights and Facebook]

To contact the author of this post, write camille@gawker.com.

Three people were wounded in a shooting today at Santa Monica College, and a suspect has been detained in the college library.

According to CBS L.A., a man was seen "shooting at cars just after noon," while students—currently taking finals—were seen "scrambling for safety." The extent of the injuries is unclear.

President Obama is holding an event a few miles away, though it's unknown whether or not the shooting is related. The Secret Service has been notified.

Here's a photo, apparently of a "bus with bullet holes":

Bus with bullet holes off Cloverfield and Olympic. @venice311 twitter.com/TyCrawf/status…

— Tyler Crawford (@TyCrawf) June 7, 2013

Update 6:19: Witnesses speaking to KTLA and KPCC have reported seeing what they presumed to be a dead body on the ground near the Santa Monica College library, but authorities have yet to confirm that rumor.

Update 5:56: Finals have been cancelled at Santa Monica College.

Update 5:36: KPCC reports that two people were hurt when the gunman opened fire on the city bus. One person was grazed by a bullet and suffered non-life-threatening injures and another was hit by broken glass. There are now at least six people being treated in area hospitals due to the shooting.

Update 5:26: The Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center is treating three women shot at Santa Monica College. Two are in critical condition and one is in serious condition. The woman shot in front of the burning house is at UCLA Medical Center Santa Monica and is said to be in good condition, according to KPCC. The suspected gunman is in custody.

Update 5:23: An eyewitness fired on by the gunman at Santa Monica College tells KPCC the gunman was a 5'10" Caucasian male armed with "an assault rifle, of course."

Update 5:17: KCRW, a public radio station on the Santa Monica College campus, is being evacuated.

Update 5:10: This from public radio station KPCC: "A short man who told reporters his name was Michael Lim was taken away by police in handcuffs from near the campus library. He told reporters that it was because he found guns, and that he was on campus meeting his ex-girlfriend."

Update 4:54: KTLA is now reporting that there were two dead men in the house, which wasn't on Santa Monica College, but near it. The woman was shot in a vehicle in front of the home.

Update 4:47: KTLA reports that firefighters have been able to squelch the house fire. A firefighter confirmed that there were two people in the house who had been shot: one female, who was wounded, and one male, who was dead. The firefighter said the fire appeared "suspicious." The female is now being treated at UCLA Medical Center.

Update 4:02: The shooting appears to be unrelated to Obama's visit. The three victims were shot inside a car on or near the campus.

Update 4:13: Police believe the shooter may be the man who started this house fire:

The inferno is real. Man with semi opened fire shot a lady burned this house vine.co/v/bLJXU5miLBi

— reid speed (@reidspeed) June 7, 2013

This is unbelievable but real vine.co/v/bLJwAKQ9OTQ

— reid speed (@reidspeed) June 7, 2013

Glenn Greenwald, who is on some kind of master cleanse of only leaked documents, obtained a "top secret directive" from President Obama ordering "his senior national security and intelligence officials to draw up a list of potential overseas targets for US cyber-attacks."

Yesterday, LA Weekly's Patrick Range McDonald created a bit of an e-gay stir with an essay whose headline wondered, "Is L.A. Gay Pride an Outdated, Adolescent Mess?" Los Angeles' Gay Pride weekend kicks off today, hence the question. The answer, according to McDonald? "An unqualified yes."

From his essay:

[Is] L.A. Gay Pride kind of stale and outdated? Are we celebrating some kind of pre-AIDS, 1970s version of the gay experience? When sexual liberation in gay culture was just as important — and justifiably so — as equality? Are we coming off passe and immature by still celebrating our gay heritage as if we're a bunch of horny, drunk 19-year-olds who came out of the closet a few weekends ago?

McDonald's argument is littered with stuffy grousing about "the same damn music with the same tweaker beat" and "cock-ring tosses to win a stuffed animal," but he makes a valid point about today's concept of gay pride, and the way in which it's been hijacked by muscle-laden floats yelling, "Whoop whoop!" Gay pride shouldn't be expressed solely through extreme partying, but during daily life: conversations with co-workers, public displays with your same-sex object of affection, the outfits you choose for your pets. Like so many cultural practices, gay pride is a 24/7 commitment. We shouldn't confine the celebration of black history to a single month, we should plant trees on days other than Arbor Day, and we should be willing to sell our hair to afford platinum fob chains for our loved ones not just on Christmas but all year round.

McDonald's solution is to bring "L.A. Pride back to its roots and make it once again a political statement. To highlight our contributions to society, and to reach out in meaningful ways to our straight allies, our parents, and extended families." Well sure. If we are not doing that already, a reminder day could be helpful.

However, the root of McDonald's argument against the visible, hedonistic displays of gay pride is that they somehow invite discrimination, that the flagrancy of it all makes said discrimination somehow deserved:

Yet once again L.A. Pride will bring out the go-go boys and cock rings, will be partly underwritten by liquor companies, and will celebrate stereotypes and outdated notions of what it means to be gay.

And then we'll wonder why certain straight folks don't take us seriously or think we're stuck in some kind of "Peter Pan syndrome" — and we'll cry bloody murder when we're treated poorly.

Well, as the old saying goes, if you don't want to be treated like a slut, don't act and look like one.

I'm not exactly sure why these notions of what it means to be gay are "outdated" if, by McDonald's estimate "hundreds of thousands of gay folks from Southern California and elsewhere will converge on West Hollywood to celebrate gay pride by marching in or watching the parade on Sunday." That sounds like a thriving cultural practice, whether you agree with it or not.

McDonald is suggesting that gays simmer down and behave if they want to be taken "seriously" or avoid mistreatment they ultimately bring upon themselves. Gay Pride celebrations may represent a loud, douchey side of the culture, but they hardly warrant animosity. If an outsider looks at them and decides that's how gays are all the time and uniformly, that's willful ignorance and the defect of that person, not the people who are having an unabashed good time.

McDonald goes on to list a number of gay men whose achievements have helped make the world a better place: civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, Walt Whitman, the people of ACT-UP and its ilk, South African activist Simon Nkoli, philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. The list stretches on. Displays of partying do not negate these accomplishments or overshadow these men. Together, the achievement, the hedonism, the specific sexuality come together to illustrate the complexity of the gay experience. No rational person judges an entire population by the sports fanatic whose out-of-shape body is painted with the colors of his favorite team, or by the fuzzy legwarmers of its dehydrated, EDM-listening youth. Public revelry is what we do when we aren't saving the world.

I get the feeling that straights are still squeamish about gay sexuality. From neutered depictions of gays in pop culture to one-on-one conversations I've had, it's clear that there exists a communicative divide — a gay person cannot avoid being inundated with all facets of heterosexuality, including the sex. Straight people can more easily ignore the ways of minorities, keeping us at arm's length and accepting us only in part and begrudgingly. The public spectacle of Gay Pride exists not just to say, "We're here, we're queer." It's also saying, "We're here, we're queer and we fuck." Editing ourselves for the sake of acceptance is disingenuous. It's a slippery slope from, "I'll tone it down and behave for the sake of sensitive straights" to "I'll stop sucking cock for the sake of sensitive straights." No mentally healthy gay guy is going to do the latter anytime soon; why bother doing the former either?

Nothing that happens during Gay Pride parades deserves discrimination. No one deserves to be treated "like a slut" in any negative way for his consensual sexual tastes and practices. In projecting what straight society will make of wonton gays and condemning the latter, McDonald is essentially rushing to make homophobic judgements before the homophobes can get to it. It's a declaration of treason that's not going to actually change anything ("Gay Pride Parade Canceled Because LA Weekly Writer Is Embarrassed" will not be a headline). It's just a way of saying, "I'm better than you guys." That kind of disconnect within our culture is a hell of a thing to show to straights, too.

At a time when anti-gay attacks are on the rise in New York and frequently in the news around the country, the need for the public displays of pride strike me as more essential than ever. And if you don't like it, don't go. Stay home. Teach an old person a new gay trick. Garden. Exercise for enjoyment, not to conform to one of those stereotypes that you loathe. And while you're at it, write something that's going to change the world, hopefully without shaming your gay brothers.

[Image via AP]

Most of the new jobs in America pay below-average wages.

Disgraced Florida man Allen West, who was forced out of the Army before being voted out of Congress after just one term, is now a Fox News talking head, naturally. One of his first orders of business? Getting to the bottom of this question: Is America's sitting attorney general more dangerous to us than a terrorist leader focused on murdering as many Americans as possible?

Hey, it's just a question.

[via Media Matters]

"Aspiring Internet porn performer" Valerie Dodds (porn name: Val MidWest) says she was constantly mocked by her fellow classmates at St. Pius X High School for her decision to enter the adult entertainment business.

So, to "get back" at them for their "rude" remarks, the 19-year-old Lincoln, Nebraska, native paid a visit to her old Catholic school to shoot a very special tribute dedicated to all the naysayers.

Naturally, it was called Pius XXX.

"I held nothing back I used my fingers, my toys and even my crucifix in my pussy," she writes on her official porn site. "I used every part of the school I could get into, payback is a bitch ha ha."

Dodds knowingly broke the law when she trespassed onto campus grounds in order to film herself masturbating on the football field, but was still a bit surprised when she was ticketed for public nudity.

"Why would you give me a ticket for public nudity if I'm trespassing onto private property?" she rhetorically asked the local ABC affiliate KETV.

To show that there were no hard feelings, Dodds went back to Pius X, but this time she dressed a bit more modestly.

That is to say, she wore pasties over her nipples and some frilly underwear.

According to the local police, because Dodds didn't expose her areolas, her follow-up stunt was perfectly legal.

For its part, Pius X remains unrepentant, releasing a statement that suggests it probably won't be apologizing to Dodds anytime soon.

"[W]e constantly follow our school's motto: To Restore All Things In Christ," the school said in its statement. "To that end, we are praying for the young lady and her family, and we stand ready to offer forgiveness and support should she seek it."

[screengrabs via KETV, Val Midwest, video via YouTube]

Taking a cue from Justin Bieber, the singing fey children from the band One Direction have launched a perfume named after a misleading assumption that you have spent time with them. It's called Our Moment, and like Bieber's Girlfriend perfume, it's a reference to one of their songs, "Moments," from their first album.

Looking baleful, churlish, wistful, smirky, and dazed, respectively, all five of these boys faces grace the pale pink box housing the perfume. But what, we wonder, does Our Moment smell like? Diamond barf, probably.

For more clues about the scent, here is a collection of choice descriptions from their paragraphs on Our Moment:

• Juicy and feminine
• Seasonal
• Sparkling
• Warm musk
• Frangipani
• Dry wood
• Enticing
• Beautifully ornate

The scent that caused of a rush of googling "frangipani" (to save you time, it's a common flower also called plumeria from the dogbane family) will be released in the UK at Harrods and through Elizabeth Arden in the US on August 25th. It costs $55 for 100 milliliters.

These past few years we, as a nation, have been lulled into a false sense of security, but this video will surely shock us back into action. I ask you, what is the number one threat to America? Bears.

Yes, that is a freaking bear opening the freaking door of a pickup truck. The bear in this video was easily chased away, but what about the next time it comes back? Will it be so easily shoo'd off? What if it learns how to hotwire that car? It's common knowledge bears know how to drive.

We are no longer safe. It is only a matter of time before bears start opening car doors, then regular doors, then get access to our tasty, sweet insides.

Local British Columbia conservation officer Denny Chretien told CBC News that the three-year-old bear's break-in is "not a common behaviour but it is occurring." Four "bearjackings" have been reported in the area, and one was a Porsche.

Door-opening bears appear to only be in Canada for the moment. Hopefully they will just eat up all of our neighbors to the North, get tired, and then hibernate forever.

Gizmodo Prankster Photoshops People Into Ads While They Wait for the Bus | Kotaku Investigation: A Video Game Studio From Hell | io9 How quick and intense workouts can help you get fitter | Gawker Now We Decide If Privacy Will Continue to Exist | Valleywag Is This Creepy Startup Behind the NSA PRISM Program?

The most Canadian fireworks display of all time took place early this morning along the Trans Canada Highway near Wawa, Ontario, after a truck transporting fireworks struck a moose and exploded.

Luckily, both the vehicle's driver and passenger managed to escape unharmed.

The accident shut down the highway for over five hours as firefighters cautiously attempted to put out the blaze while dodging fireworks shooting out of the truck in every direction.

Wawa-news notes that there were two additional moose-involved accidents last night in the same area, but they didn't result in a fireworks display.

[video, photos via Wawa-news]

"I applied for a writer job at Palantir," a California journalist tells Front! "They specialize in using artificial intelligence to analyze data, something like that. My [Republican friend] works there. I have a few tidbits from the hiring process—they are sort of menacing, in retrospect." It's apparently a tough place to get a job.

The Facebook/CIA-funded Silicon Valley startup denies that its "world's leading intelligence infrastructure platform" called Prism is the same wholesale data-mining operation called Prism that's identified in National Security Agency documents. But nobody's going to believe that, even if it winds up being vaguely "true" thanks to a paper trail or technicality. Palantir is in the business of selling your data to the people who want it most and will pay the most to get it: The Government.

Let's take a look at the job description:

Writers at Palantir are wordsmiths who work quickly and precisely. We handle language the way our developers handle code, meaning we’re the best at what we do and perform with agility under pressure. Our team finds requests for proposals, aligns priorities with the rest of the business development team, and then writes and edits a range of documents in response to these postings. Time is usually of the essence, so we’re always ready to contort language to our needs on short notice. We also write most of Palantir’s external facing language, and people from all over the company come to us for advice when they need to draft documents. Our backgrounds are diverse; some of us have journal publications, others have graduate degrees in the humanities or law, but we all have a passion for the written word and the drive to make things perfect every time.

Responsibilities

• Communicate the core concepts of the Palantir Government product to multiple audiences, including contracting officers, executives, policy makers, and the public
• Write responses, solo or collaboratively, to contract competitions and requests-for-information from potential customers
• Create succinct concept papers and craft marketing documents to support outreach to customers
• Identify new customers and opportunities with the business development team
• Be a product expert

Requirements

• Strong demonstrated writing and editing ability
• Strong communication and interpersonal skills
• Ability to travel on relatively short notice
• Extremely detail-oriented
• Technical background helpful but not required

Location

• Flexible – any of our offices

This tech-jobs list calls Palantir one of the 10 toughest places to interview, and notes the mysterious company's satellite offices in McLean, Virginia—home of Dick Cheney and the CIA—and London, home of the British intelligence services MI5 and MI6.

And if this doesn't work out, you can always apply to be a lawyer for the NSA. They're hiring!

An Ohio grand jury has indicted Ariel Castro on 329 counts of kidnapping, assault and sexual abuse of three women in Cleveland.

It's comical, but no real surprise, that pop-science plagiarist and fabricator Jonah Lehrer appears to have lifted someone else's work for his new book proposal. Lehrer has established by now that he is a pathological fraud. The question on the table is: What kind of a fraud is Jonathan Karp, the publisher of Simon & Schuster, which bought the book?

Jonathan Karp is unquestionably a fraud. His decision to buy Lehrer's proposal—not quite 11 months after Lehrer was exposed as a journalist crook, forcing the pulping of his last book—makes him and Simon & Schuster Lehrer's de facto co-conspirators.

Even before Slate's Daniel Engber flagged the similarity between Lehrer's proposal and passages from Adam Gopnik, it was obvious that Lehrer was unreformed. The New York Times got a copy of the proposal yesterday and quoted passages from it, including one narrating the moment when Lehrer found out that other people had found out that he was a fraud:

“I feel the shiver of a voice-mail message,” he wrote... “I listen to the message. I have been found out. I puke into a recycling bin. And then I start to cry. Why was I crying? I had been caught in a lie, a desperate attempt to conceal my mistakes. And now it was clear that, within 24 hours, my fall would begin. I would lose my job and my reputation. My private shame would become public.”

"Recycling bin" is a hilarious choice of detail, for the compulsive plagiarist. And, obviously: Bring us two witnesses who saw you puke when and where you claim you puked.

Or don't bother. Even this little passage demonstrates that Lehrer is still using his writing to deceive and manipulate: "I had been caught in a lie, a desperate attempt to conceal my mistakes." This is three-card monte. Lehrer was caught in a lie because he was trying to conceal not "mistakes" but a longstanding, not at all desperate program of lying, which was the foundation of his career.

As Lehrer's portfolio and reputation fell apart last year—or seemed to be falling apart—a certain idiotic subset of his defenders accused his critics of being "jealous." It was a better word choice than they meant it to be, in the sense that the Old Testament God is a jealous god: Lehrer was and remains a threat to people who want to make a living as journalists, because he found success as fake journalist. This success came at other people's expense.

Writing about science is difficult, skilled work. It requires a reporter to genuinely understand complicated subjects, to derive clear meaning from material rife with caveats and confounding variables and false positives. The facts can stubbornly refuse to fit the story.

Lehrer found the hack to solve this problem: He stole other writers' accounts of the facts, or he made up facts of his own to suit the argument. This is what made him so glib, so fast, and so commercially appealing. He could produce work at several times the pace of the sluggards who did the real work. And when even he couldn't produce it speedily enough to meet demand, he would just copy-paste something he'd published before. The real science writers grumbled all along about how sloppy and wrong he was, but who even listened? They weren't famous.

As Hamilton Nolan wrote when Lehrer's troubles were beginning, Jonah Lehrer does not actually know how to do journalism. He is a counterfeiter. He is not a smooth writer with a regrettable habit of cutting corners—the cut corners are what make the writing smooth. The smoothness is what plays on the lecture circuit. The bogus product is his only product.

And it's the product that Simon & Schuster has now agreed to buy, in the hopes of selling it to more people. Lehrer cranked out a 65-page book proposal, offering an 80,000-word manuscript that will range freely across a vast landscape of knowledge. There's no scaling back to reflect a newly acquired epistemological or professional modesty. It's the same unearned assurance he's been peddling all along. The scam hasn't changed; Jonathan Karp just wants in on it.

"We believe in second chances," Karp told the Times. Again, less than a year has passed since Jonah Lehrer had to leave his New Yorker job. Less than a year has passed since his previous publisher had to withdraw his book on creativity, Imagine, because of its fake Bob Dylan quotes. This is not a second chance, it's an extension on his first chance.

Lehrer's first book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, came out in 2007. His second, How We Decide, came out in 2009. His third, the one that got him in trouble, came out in 2012. If he delivers his manuscript on time, in the fall of 2014, the book should arrive on shelves in 2015, precisely on his established schedule, as if nothing had happened.

The subject of this one, according to Slate and the Times, will be love. Lehrer wrote that his downfall, such as it was, taught him—swiftly!—that love is what matters. As the Times quotes:

“Careers fall apart; homes fall down; we give away what we don’t want and sell what we can’t afford,” he wrote. “And yet, if we are lucky, such losses reveal what remains. When we are stripped of what we wanted, we see what we will always need: those people who love us, even after the fall.”

...

“This book is about what has lasted in my own life,” he wrote. “I wanted to write it down so that I would not forget; so that, one day, I might tell my young daughter what I’ve learned.”

One thing Lehrer certainly did learn is the scumbag tactic of hiding behind his young daughter, of using the fact that his semen once landed on an egg to certify himself as a serious and meaningful human being. Actual scientific fact: Lots of people—billions of people—make babies. A narcissistic con man who makes a baby is a narcissistic con man with a baby.

And but aside from his poor daughter/moral prop, what else has remained for Jonah Lehrer, now that transitory things have gone? What was it that lasted? Well, a $20,000 speaking fee from the Knight Foundation, for starters. And now a brand-new book contract, and with any luck, a new audience of suckers. What does love mean? Love—to coin a catchy, original phrase—means never having to say you're sorry.

Here's a series of clips of Jaden Smith babbling about the realism of sci-fi (aliens are making it realer, and The Matrix and Star Trek are so close to how reality could be, FYI). He also compares acting after growing up in the Pinkett-Smith household to speaking French after growing up in France. That seems like science, too.

This is from a special that aired on the British station Sky Movies HD and was about the abysmal After Earth, which opens in the UK today. The kid's acting is shaky, but he gives one hell of an interview.

Welcome to Annotate This, where we gather reviews, trailers, and annotate the posters for movies coming out this week. It will help you decide what to avoid, what to see, and what to pretend to see. Click on the image above to add your comments to the mix.

The Internship

Beloved onscreen couple Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson are back together—but rather than attending age appropriate celebrations, they are joining the unpaid workforce. It's already been called the "best worst comedy of the year thus far." It does not attempt topicality. Google CEO Larry Page loves it!

Much Ado About Nothing (Limited)

Joss Whedon's "backyard experiment" is jazzy and velvety, or as others will say, silken. While it's got a joyous party atmosphere, it's also got things to say about slut shaming. Also Whedon has cast his reliable favorites: Alexis Denisof, Clark Gregg, Nathan Fillion, Sean Maher, Jillian Morgese, Reed Diamond, and Fran Kranz.

The Purge

Ethan Hawke and Lena Headey star in this horror film that is either high-concept or catchpenny depending on who you ask. No matter, one reviewer writes, it's "got no business being as good as it is." The Purge takes place in the near future of America, when we have emerged into a utopian society that takes out its anger through an annual event called "The Purge," when laws, emergency services, police are suspended for twelve hours and people can go about murdering and pillaging. A Roomba makes an excellent cameo.

Tiger Eyes (Limited)

The first movie adaptation of a book by the much-beloved Judy Blume, Tiger Eyes is a coming of age story set in the American southwest. Though it's "soggy with emo music," it's an engaging and sensitive portrayal of growing up.

The Wall (Limited)

This supernatural, suspenseful psychological thriller is based on Marlen Haushofer's feminist classic of the same title. Martina Gedeck plays a woman living in a rural cottage in Austria, and finds her way back to the world is blocked by a invisible wall. Gedeck's performance and "spectrally wearied face" are amazing.

Evocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie (Limited)

The movie is high decibel and absurdly foul-mouthed—and most of this is coming from the subject, Mr. Morton Downey Jr. himself. The conservative television talk show host perfected the angered performance that paved the way for the likes of Hannity, Reilly, and Beck. The most interesting part of this documentary is the way it questions the nature of performance and how reality television shapes its participants.

Violet & Daisy (Limited)

The directorial debut from Precious writer Geoffrey Fletcher is an attempt at a stylish murder flick starring Alexis Bledel and Saoirse Ronan. While it's questionably sentimental, somehow dopey and arch simultaneously, it is admirably ambitious. Some scenes are truly fantastic looking, but it barely holds up beyond its surface value.

As Cool As I Am (Limited)

A slight coming of age story about an articulate young woman navigating the world with her young parents—played by James Marsden and Claire Danes, who is crying in the trailer.

Wish You Were Here (Limited)

Four friends journey to have some debauchery in Southeast Asia, one goes missing, they can't remember anything. But it's not The Hangover II—it's a domestic drama, with "structural fireworks" and "emotional authenticity." From first time director Kiernan Darcy-Smith, it expertly depicts "lovely façades and the rot within."

Rapture-Palooza (Limited)

Rapture-Palooza is an ironic, parody rapture flick starring Anna Kendrick as a young woman caught in the middle of the rapture, trying to trick the antichrist who gets stuck on earth. Oh and Craig Robinson is antichrist! Written by Chris Matheson, of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, this film should play right into the hands of Shaun of the Dead fans.

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