You should know that this kind of thing, this thing here where Will Arnett announces to a screaming late-night audience that more Arrested Development will be coming and then every TV-themed blog or vertical in the world writes the same 125-word post about that announcement, that shit is so 2009. Having to go through it again is the exact kind of punishment we deserve if no one is willing to approach any of the cast or crew on the street, from here on out, and slap them broad-hand across the face.

Otherwise we are seeing the beginning of a paper chain of broken hearts that ends at some gauzy (but almost glimpsable!) point along the horizon and it involves everyone on down to Alia Shawkat's hair dresser being asked about the future and that poor woman has a family and a confusingly large cable bill to worry about.

We were not a society yet deserving of the unceasing brilliance of the original Arrested Development, more than 10 years ago, and were were perhaps too ourselves in the run-up to its fourth season return; but now the sun has set and the clouds have shifted and can you feel the warmth of a new day breaking?; and I would really just like everyone to quiet down and go home for the weekend so I can start binge-watching Going Deep With David Rees.

We no longer need to know that we need to know more Arrested Development is coming. It just needs to arrive.

[Image via Netflix]

Morning After is a new home for television discussion online, brought to you by Gawker. Follow @GawkerMA and read more about it here.

When news broke that Megan Fox and Brian Austin Green named their second son Bodhi after he was born earlier this year, many people said, "Just like Patrick Swayze's character in the surfer heist Point Break!" On last night's Conan, Fox confirmed that her son is indeed just like Patrick Swayze's character in Point Break.

Said Fox of her son, whose middle name is Ransom:

In Buddhism, it's the point when Buddha became enlightened and he reached nirvana, he was sitting beneath the bodhi tree. So, from there, but also from the greatest movie of all time, Point Break. I don't know if anyone remembers, Patrick Swayze was Bodhi. I would be lying if I said that that didn't influence me.

Life sure has a sick sense of humor, and so does Megan Fox. Props.

Supporters of the Islamic State, or IS, are turning to social media to recruit their next batch of warriors: radicalized Muslim sympathizers on Tumblr who desperately want to become wives.

As IS continues to wage their brutal crusade, deep in the recesses of the internet there is a small community of young, passionate, and impressionable young women in European and Southeast Asian countries, who in blind fanatical devotion to the Islamic State leave their families and homes to journey to Syria. They don't make this journey to take up arms though—they do it to become mujahida, that is, the wife of a mujahid/jihadist. While various authorities are very fearful of the consequences of these extremist Muslim youths' mobility, it does seem like at least some of the highly romanticized idea of becoming the wife of a "freedom fighter" is a fantasy that stays online.

Still, it's a fact—there are Muslim women from various countries who have embarked on an arduous journey to Syria, and they do beckon their "sisters" to follow.

Enter the world of Mujahida Tumblr, a resource for extremist Muslim young ladies in their late teens to early twenties from all over the world who champion the cause of the Islamic State. And sometimes reblog silly cat gifs. In a strange way, the mujahida community kind of reflects other Tumblr fandoms like the Hunters of Supernatural or Cumberbitches. It's a way for niche groups to share thoughts and memes and find support, advice even. The only difference is while Whovians trade gifs of their favorite Doctors and lines, Mujahida reblog quotes about faith in Allah, shittalk Israel (to death bro), and celebrate jihad. It's the ideal place for narrow-minded radicalism to fester as brutal and gory images are way too easily disseminated. But as committed as these women are to the bloody IS crusade, bizarrely, there is also a strong element of docile compassion that characterizes mujahida wife-hood.

There is a substantial community on Tumblr, but they're certainly not limited to the site—curious observers and sympathizers can also reach out to mujahida over Twitter and Ask.fm, a Latvian social media service that allows users to ask questions anonymously. Mujahida also use Kik Messenger for personal queries or providing potential contacts for those who are more serious about their hijra, or pilgramage to Syria. It seems that the most common path to join IS in Syria is through Turkey, where the young women posing as innocuous travelers then meet up with their contacts and go rogue, crossing over into Syria. Authorities, however, appear to be catching onto this, and Turkey is becoming a riskier gateway for aspiring mujahida.

These women's rather localized online interactions have garnered the attention of Search for International Terrorist Entities (or SITE) Intelligence Group a for-profit organization that tracks the online activity of various extremist groups.

A post on the SITE page entitled "Girl Talk: Calling Western Women to Syria" reads:

Constant calls and encouragement for women to emigrate to the Islamic State takes a vastly different form than does the propaganda aimed at male jihadis. Instead of tales of adventure, glory, and brotherhood, the content aimed at English-speaking women emphasizes the development of the private sphere of the state, and the satisfaction of serving as the emotional and domestic bulwarks of individual fighters and of the newly emergent Caliphate.

While SITE exaggerates the "constant encouragement" as the community itself is pretty tiny, it is true that the focus of the mujahida is not engaging in actual battle, but fulfilling the duties of a wife and mother. There is a a very romanticized view that some have (and have reblogged) of a fully veiled woman sporting an AK-47 fighting side-by-side with men, but that is plain wrong. Various Tumblr mujahida and purported mujahid repeatedly insist (presumably because girls repeatedly ask when they can get their own AK-47s) that women's role in jihad is explicitly domestic.

Women do not fight in the front lines—the very purpose of a woman journeying all that way is to get married. They cook for their husbands. They are meant to have babies and groom the next generation of Lions (a nickname for IS fighters). They feel blessed and have the utmost pride if their husbands die in battle. Maybe if their husbands have time they can teach their wives how to shoot. But aside from that, the actual fighting and the actual violence is left to the men.

One particularly prolific online personality (who boasts a Twitter following of 2,000, so she's no Rihanna or Florida Woman even), Umm Layth is supposedly woman from "north of Britain" living in Syria who sometimes doles out advice for ladies interested in joining the fight as a mujahira. She's penned two longer posts in a series entitled "Diary of a Mujahida" in which she explains her journey and gives advice on how to prepare oneself for the transition of moving to Syria. (Interestingly enough she advises women to bring their own three-layer niqabs because "the Syrians view of Hijab is a complete joke.") She also give tips on Twitter:

1. Biggest tip to sisters: don't take detours, take the quickest route, don't play around with your Hijrah by staying longer than 1 day for

— ام ليث (@UmmLayth_) July 26, 2014

2. safety and get in touch with your contacts as soon as you reach your destination.

— ام ليث (@UmmLayth_) July 26, 2014

Other mujahidas also give advice over Tumblr, from practical things explaining the best way to exchange money into Syrian currency to stressing the importance of learning Arabic upon arriving in Syria, to advice on how to get to Syria without parental permission, which is not technically allowed in Islam but can somehow be bypassed by transference of guardianship—quite the loophole. The most common questions come from people who are simply curious as to what life is like over there in Syria, as if gauging whether or not it's worth it to make the trip. Of course the responses seem very idealized for what's actually going on over there.

But while scrolling through some of the mujahida Tumblr accounts, amidst all the quotes about faith and Allah and bloody pictures from Gaza, and the shade thrown at white Mujahida from other Muslim girls, themes of love and romance continuously resurfaced. Whether it was a love letter from a mujahid to his wife or a cute picture of a couple or all the pictures of a lion and lioness (because of the Lions thing), at the end of the day, all these young women want is to find true love. They constantly hail hijabs and niqabs, yes for their modesty (keep in mind that IS decreed women reject glamour and be fully veiled "or risk severe punishment"), but also because they believe that only their true love, their husband will be able to see the true beauty underneath.

These young women may support one of the most brutal terrorist organizations, a caliphate whose boundaries are quite literally demarcated in blood. They may roll their eyes at moderate Muslims who call for peace (because extremism is ALWAYS cool in the eyes of youths). They may call for beheadings and reblog statements from other stir-crazy extremists in an incredibly misguided attempt to obtain validation. But honestly, they're really not all that different from any of the other 19-year-old hopeless romantics on Tumblr.

While these images of romance and marrying "freedom fighters" is cute and all, as Jamie Dettmer at the Daily Beast illuminates, at the end of the day these girls are merely seen as prizes for the fighters:

But there is no question that extremist groups try to reward their fighters with brides, however they can be obtained. One obvious example elsewhere is the mass kidnapping of schoolgirls by Boko Haram in Nigeria.

Islamic State has opened a "marriage bureau" in the northern Syrian town of Al Bab for women who want to wed jihadist fighters in territory they control, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based pro-opposition group that relies on activists on the ground for its information.

Mujahida often refute the suggestion that their marriages are arranged. After all, it's all in the name of love (and Allah). But given the fact that IS fighters have been known to force Syrian women to marry them without consent, sometimes under pseudonyms, sometimes by verbal agreement only, and sometimes for merely a few months, there is some serious ambiguity as to what constitutes an actual marriage anyway.

These aspiring Western mujahidas have been coerced online into thinking that being a jihadist spouse and mother is their purpose in life, but I'm not too convinced they understand the reality of the situation on the ground. When the lion and lioness pictures and Quran quotes are stripped away, the mujahida seems less like a noble equal and more like a Stockholm Syndrome-afflicted hostage.

Images via Tumblr.

On Monday, Boing Boing and Art News shared an article about a shady Chinese billionaire killed by some shady Chinese hooch, causing some smug readers to shout "karma."

According to the report, "notorious" Hong Kong businessman Dingxiang Loeng died at his own 50th birthday party after opening an over-carbonated, possibly counterfeit champagne bottle and hitting himself in the head with the cork.

Unfortunately for the Internet's armchair Punishers, the too-good-to-be-true tale of cosmic justice is both bad and false. The story comes from fib-tellers World News Daily, whose website bears the disclaimer "All news articles contained within worldnewsdailyreport.com are fiction, and presumably fake news."

Additionally, web editors should have noticed a number of red flags in the article itself, which names Leong as 51 on the Forbes list of Hong Kong's 50 richest people and is illustrated with an improbably gruesome photo from 2012's Lamma Island ferry collision.

Both Boing Boing and Art News have since taken their posts down, but the story continues to spread online, amassing tens of thousands of shares. Sadly, at this time death by champagne cork remains strictly theoretical.

[Image via Shutterstock]

For years, tech giants like Apple, Google, and Adobe made secret agreements to avoid hiring rival talent, keeping salaries artificially suppressed. These companies almost got away with paying a tiny settlement—but that monetary mea culpa just got shot down.

U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh says the paltry payout just isn't enough, given that damages could have run into the billions:

Class members would receive an average of approximately $3,7506 from the instant settlement if the Court were to grant all requested deductions and there were no further opt-outs...The Court finds the total settlement amount falls below the range of reasonableness. The Court is concerned that Class members recover less on a proportional basis from the instant settlement with Remaining Defendants than from the settlement with the Settled Defendants a year ago, despite the fact that the case has progressed consistently in the Class's favor since then.

In other words, the evidence against Apple and company has been so vast, $300 million or so just won't cut it. The trove of emails, conversations, and testimonies unearthed during the suit make it clear that "other Defendants' CEOs maintained the anti-solicitation agreements out of fear of and deference to Mr. [Steve] Jobs."

Judge Koh says damages should not be any less than $380 million—and that still seems pretty light for an intricate conspiracy against employees of some of America's richest firms.

Koh's order can be read in full below.

show_temp by Gawker.com

Photo: Getty

Forty years ago, Richard Milhous Nixon became the first and only president to announce his resignation from office. Thank God he did, because Nixon was a gill-breathing bottom-dweller, a paranoiac with a reverse-Midas touch, turning everything he contacted into turd. But his disgraceful quitting also screwed us.

Even as presidential hopefuls go, Nixon was an amoral hack. And he was a presidential hopeful for far longer—decades longer—than he was a president. The reason Nixon left the office he'd struggled so hard to achieve was that he was about to get impeached over the coverup of the Watergate break-in, and he didn't want to be impeached. To avoid removal from office, he would have needed 34 senators not to vote for impeachment. By one academic estimate, he couldn't have mustered more than 11.

He never seemed to have any allies whose alliances were based on more than convenience. And with good reason. Here are some things that Nixon wrought on Americans in his short time in the Oval Office:

The silent majority.

The Southern strategy.

(See also: War on Crime.)

Ratfucking.

Secret bombing.

Treason.

Free home-dictator installation.

An oil embargo and Mideast clusterfuck.

Global food shortages.

War on Drugs.

A tax cheat for vice president.

Donald Rumsfeld.

Dick Cheney.

On the plus side, the way Nixon went down has thrown the United States into an existential angst from which we will never recover. Since August 8, 1974, our nation has been post-governmental. And this ought to be a good thing.

There will never be another legitimate, unfettered president—an observation that's only grown more obvious since the Clinton impeachment fiasco, Bush v. Gore, Obama birtherism, and whatever the hell insano theories are likely to dog successive presidents.

In resigning, Nixon also swung a cudgel against Americans' unfounded faith in the legislative branch. He acknowledged no wrongdoing in his farewell speech, instead blaming partisan politics and congressional vote-whipping for his inability to continue as president. "What was intended to be an unprecedented humiliation for any American president, Nixon converted into a virtual parliamentary acknowledgement of almost blameless insufficiency of legislative support to continue," wrote Conrad Black, a Nixon biographer and convicted felon who, like his subject, is a notoriously amoral platitude generator.

In so doing, Nixon set the tone for future post-governmental America: Feckless presidents could always blame their fecklessness on a feckless Congress. The United States electorate would forever after be bereft of fecks.

Such existential angst could, and should, be a positive development. There's something refreshingly honest about recognizing that American greatness is made by men and women, not ordained by God and Nature. Yes, it is unmakeable. It is always being unmade. But as long as we are sober about our humanity and our fallibility, we can work together in making a livable nation that lasts awhile. "To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely," the sedate Edmund Burke wrote. Rather than placing blind faith in institutions and politicians and their rapacious urges because America, we could acknowledge that America is something we build every day, something that can easily suck, or go extinct, if we call in sick—a privilege and a responsibility.

And yet, rather than embrace this existential state, most Americans' response—driven by the political machines and centuries of ossified culture and a sheer inability to manage anything beyond the increasing complexities of the workaday—has been to pretend it doesn't exist, to pretend that the system worked in the wake of Nixon's resignation, and that we are still the exceptional nation.

Tricky Dick's departure did not erode the American imperium one bit. We high-stepped through eight years of a senile hawk who owed his fortunes to a trained chimpanzee. We limped through eight years of Clintonesque not-wars and not-truths. We had Bush wars and Obama wars and we are likely to have more Clinton or Bush wars after Obama.

Nevertheless, improvement is possible. The information is available. After Nixon, some of us know better than to pretend that this is democracy, that the Will of the People is immanent and immutable in American electoral culture, that our federal leadership is any less a kitschy performance than a hologram of pint-sized Shirley Temple drinking a Coke on the back of a rearing Barnum & Bailey elephant, belting out God Bless America on a baseball field named after a beer in a stadium named after a bank while the Thunderbirds scream red white and blue contrails overhead and airdrop a division of Mark McGwire bobble-heads on us as we draw sparklers from beneath our wide-cushioned stadium seats and turn to the Diamondvision screen for a special message about freedom and our overseas troops from Chevy starring Rascal Flatts.

Are Americans any freer, or happier, than other citizens of the world? Freer and happier than most, perhaps, but that is a low bar to clear. Yet thanks to l'affaire Nixon, we have a deeper freedom than we had before: the freedom to choose between entertainment and functional government. All we need to do now is stop deferring the latter in pursuit of the former.

In a recent interview with Details, Kate Upton spilled the beans about why she hasn't yet—and may never—so sorry—pose #fullynude.

Upton explained to Details that, while she does respect women who bare it all ("Your body is art, your body is beautiful, and to be photographed in that way is amazing and it's received in a very positive way."), she has her own reason for holding back. What is that reason? Her answer is featured somewhere in this quiz, hidden among seemingly possible lies.

Can you correctly guess which answer is true?

Why Won't Kate Upton Pose Nude?

A. She has mirrors instead of private parts and if she posed nude you'd see the photographer.

B. Her vagina and boobs are actually just little Kate Upton heads and you've already seen her head so what's the point?

C. She is frequently nude in photographs: her personals simply look like bikini pieces.

D. She grows a new vagina and new boobs every day, so she never has enough time to get comfortable enough with them to share them with the world.

E. There isn't a photographer in the world who'd do it.

F. "But with social media and the Internet and not so great blogs and the attention like that, I don't think that my pictures would be received in the way that I'd want them to be received. That's why I've stayed away from them. I really appreciate those photos and I think those women are beautiful, but I think social media and the Internet has prevented me from putting myself out there like that."

So, what do you think? (Answer key below.)

[Answer Key: F]

[image via Getty]

A TSA employee living near Sacramento, Calif. is facing underage sex charges after FBI agents posing as a woman and her teenage daughter caught him in a Craigslist sting.

The Placer County Sheriff's Department says investigators spotted a Casual Encounters ad last month that sought sex with a mother-daughter duo. They involved the FBI, who exchanged emails with the poster, 54-year-old TSA worker George Hristovski.

"Maybe you are a mother with a younger daughter who is interested in finding a man to teach your daughter. A man to show your daughter what your daddy showed you," part of the ad read, according to the criminal complaint against him.

A female agent responded to the ad, playing the role of the "mom," the San Francisco Chronicle reports. She traded photos and personal information with Hristovski until eventually, the FBI says, he asked for the email address of her fictional 13-year-old daughter.

According to the FBI, Hristovski asked the "daughter" for photos and sexual information, which gave them enough evidence to raid his home. The FBI says Hristovski told them that his conversation with the supposed 13-year-old was "just a fantasy," and if the girl had actually sent him any photos, he would have reported her mom to law enforcement for letting that happen.

The FBI also connected Hristovski's email address to a number of other sexual Craigslist postings from 2009, some of which were posted from Department of Homeland Security IP addresses. His LinkedIn page, which uses the same photo he allegedly sent to agents during the sting, lists him as an inspector with DHS, and a former airline security agent.

Hristovski has been charged with attempted production of child pornography and attempted enticement of a minor, the Chronicle reports, and the TSA has suspended him and started the process of firing him.

[H/T Daily Dot, Photo: ABC10]

In the past couple weeks both Forbes and Wired have published first-hand accounts of the perils of "fundraising while female." The anecdotes about harassment, discrimination, and the hassle of disproving an investor's assumptions about gender are familiar. But you won't find the name of single male venture capitalist who made these women feel compromised, harassed, belittled, or duped.

Even when the discussion turned to Secret, the anonymous app best known for dissecting the tech industry into shreds, commenters were reluctant to name names.

The reasons for this are obvious and haven't changed since the last tech blog I worked at. They're different versions of the same reasons women usually feel unsafe. You will be told calling someone out is libel, you will be told they're a nice guy, they're married, that other women experienced nothing of the kind. (Just check the Secret thread.)

Venture capitalists live in a clubhouse, and those outside the chosen cohort don't want another mark against them. They prefer to pitch their idea as a founder first, female second, and victim not at all. Forbes bent their rules about anonymity to try to make the female author feel protected and even still the investors are only identified as The Masseuse and The Bachelor, that's as far as she felt she could go without financial repercussions.

@joshelman @BenedictEvans @jeffbercovici It's not my place to dictate a solution, but I think until victims can name names this won't change

— Ben Popper (@benpopper) August 8, 2014

"As much as I love [this article], I'm not even going to share it within my social network." Wow. http://t.co/obnpv9kZvp

— Jeff Bercovici (@jeffbercovici) August 8, 2014

Between these two pieces, the quote that resonated the most came from Y Combinator alum Kathryn Minshew:

For every story you hear about investors behaving badly, there are far worse stories that many women wouldn't dare to tell. "The most common thing I hear from other women is: 'Oh the stories I'll tell once I'm far enough along that I don't have to worry about being shamed,'" says Kathryn Minshew, co-founder of the job search and career advice site The Muse.

Oh the times I have heard this same line! Over coffee, over fruit juice, over DM, you name it. In the years I've been reporting on tech, no one of them has yet felt "far enough along" to safely go on the record.

This roots of this issue are structural and I have no easy suggestion to weed it out. But one good place to start might be from those who have nothing to lose. Re/code cofounder Kara Swisher made a similar argument at a recent event advising Bay Area tech interns:

"I think all we have to do to change the industry as a whole is to just be sexless, just absolutely ignore the fact that you're a woman and compete just as hard as the men," [Michael Callahan*, the cofounder and CEO of One] said.

Swisher was quick to reply, sarcastically apologizing that women couldn't vote until a century ago, and saying it's not just "up to the women to lean in or whatever the fuck they're supposed to do," calling men to be more aware of the gender disparity.

After I wrote about Y Combinator's half-hearted blog post about diversity, Sam Altman, the president of the accelerator, reached out to me on privately on Facebook and said I could share what he wrote:

i asked several YC founders if i could share specific examples of their own experience, but they all asked me not to it's difficult to fully anonymize but i did generally talk about investors being inappropriate and also only focusing on the men in the room, which were the two most common issues [...]

yes, they dont get told. its a really hard situation, but i dont feel like its my place to push anyone more than once to tell the stories

but we do quietly just stop inviting investors to demo day, sending them referrals, etc

(and i have asked a number of times if i can make the reason public, but for super understandable reasons the women that have suffered the abuse don't want it)

If the president of Y Combinator isn't going to name the names he has on a secret list, then maybe male investors can start talking amongst themselves. The women are already are.

*Correction: An earlier version of this post misidentified Michael Callahan in the block quote above as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Greylock Partners. The quote was from a different Michael Callahan, the cofounder and CEO of One. Valleywag regrets the error.

If you want to talking about fundraising while female, please email nitasha@gawker.com.

[Image via Shutterstock]

Jerry Seinfeld went to dinner at Prince's Hot Chicken Shack in Nashville recently, and he had a screaming good time. He had seen a documentary about the restaurant and wanted to check it out, and he thought the chicken was great. One thing caught his eye, though: the black people.

Here is Jerry Seinfeld telling the story of going to Prince's Hot Chicken Shack in Nashville.

There's a place in Nashville called Prince's Chicken, which is one of the hottest chicken places in the country. I saw a mini-documentary about it, and then we were working in Nashville, and I went there. Apparently, the chicken is so hot that it makes people engage in spontaneous sex acts in the parking lot. So we went there late at night after a show. It's all black people at, like, two in the morning. It's not in the greatest neighborhood. It was me and two other guys in suits. We took our suits off and rolled up our sleeves. We got the sauce all over our white shifts and screamed from the heat. It's so spicy! That was the most adventurous thing I've eaten lately. I'm definitely going back there, too.

What's the deal with black people hanging around restaurants at two in the morning? You ever noticed this?

The unfolding disaster in Iraq is a difficult problem to solve, as we have pointed out. But it's one that many everyday Americans feel a real stake in. Nowhere is this more evident than in Cher's tweets from this afternoon.

#Cristians 😱 #Yazidis on mountain will DIE & Need more than3 drops of water & Tiny amount of🍗🍔 GENOCIDE, Heads cut off Crucifixions Help🙏

— Cher (@cher) August 8, 2014

Critically, Cher begins her analysis not only by drawing attention to the serious plight of some 40,000 Yazidi refugees and Christians fleeing persecution in Northern Iraq but also by placing herself squarely and decisively in the "it's a praying-hands emoji NOT a high-five" camp.

Also, to clarify, the Yazidis are not Christians, but both groups do face subjugation or killing by Islamic militants in Iraq, as Cher suggests:

Sorry, Correction Needed.illustration,DONT twt till u calm down.Yadis r on hill,But not Christians. Christians r Being Killed2. Its Barbaric

— Cher (@cher) August 8, 2014

It's not clear whether planned U.S. humanitarian airdrops will include chicken legs and cheeseburgers, but it really can't hurt.

Weird..should have NEVER invaded Iraq & decimated our forces..NOW we Need 2 fight a group WORSE than Al Qaede who say they will destroy us

— Cher (@cher) August 8, 2014

Is the Islamic State worse than Al Qaeda? This is a difficult qualitative judgment: One is responsible for nearly 3,000 deaths on U.S. soil; the other is responsible for many more deaths in Iraq and Syria, but it's unclear what their aims are beyond regional dominance and belligerent rhetoric.

A more quantitative call is whether U.S. forces were "decimated" in Iraq. It's true that some 4,500 U.S. troops died in the Iraq War, and some vets feel that their sacrifices are best honored by inflicting damage against the Islamic State insurgents who now carry on in the country.

& of course AMERICANS have no stomach 4 war (Rightly So) We cant take care of abused service members we have!But ISIS Has taken over much &

— Cher (@cher) August 8, 2014

Cher is on point here. Yesterday, we covered the United States electorate's understandable skepticism about foreign military entanglements. Yet the magnitude and specificity of the Islamic State's brutality would seem to demand some U.S. response—if we can say with confidence that the U.S. can and ought to effect a positive change for Iraqis.

Of Middle East & will keep it. Its horror story.#Obama shouldn’t have let it go so far. we Cant Stop them! w/out👢‘s on ground.what 2 Do ?

— Cher (@cher) August 8, 2014

Cher may in fact be writing more honestly than American government officials here in suggesting that the Islamic State's fortunes cannot be reversed without more effective ground forces. Can that be done with Turkish or Iranian troops, rather than American ones? Most signs point to "no." And given that the U.S.-trained Iraqi army was routed so easily when fighting alone, another U.S. ground presence might become an open-ended affair.

Isis believes Yazidis r devil worshipers & are killed. Christians r Given chance 2convert or die.Isis’s vows 2 come USA. WAR IS SO HORID

— Cher (@cher) August 8, 2014

Here, Cher channels the somewhat platitudinous Hemingway. "I have seen much war in my lifetime and I hate it profoundly," Big Papa wrote. "But there are worse things than war and all of them come with defeat."

Despite these truisms, it's worth examining critically whether Islamic State rebels should be taken at their word when they make brash claims about conquering America—in other words, whether their movement is best interpreted as a regional one with abstract globalist aims, or whether it's the wartime bravado of the foot soldier.

Middle East has always been a Debacle,but hard 2 C it in REAL TIME. Hell is Hell No matter how many X’s U C It😱 Israelis & Palistinans is 💔

— Cher (@cher) August 8, 2014

Cher has a basic command of the salient geostrategic variables, but lacks the dispassionate affect of a political realist. She seems to be more of a conflicted pluralist in international affairs, one whose ability to prescribe parsimonious policies based on her theoretical assumptions is undermined by the heartbreaking recent events in the Mideast region. It truly is a problem from hell.

Nevertheless, Cher affirms, we should proceed with guarded sanguinity:

Sorry Didn’t wish u great Day/Nite 1st. Have Peaceful moment,then Remember To laugh,find something 2b grateful 4 & Jump on bed 3 X’s😉

— Cher (@cher) August 8, 2014

In the pantheon of things human beings do to alter their state of mind, enjoying a hash brownie honestly ranks somewhere around "standing up too quickly" in terms of the overall danger to society at large.

But because everything is bigger in Texas–including ridiculous jail sentences for what amounts to a petty offense out in the civilized world–it could conceivably send a 19-year-old Texan named Jacob Lavoro to prison for the rest of his life.

Lavoro was arrested at his home in April after a neighbor complained about the smell of smoke coming from his apartment. Police at the scene weighed the brownies, and charged Lavoro with having a pound and a half worth of drugs with the intent to sell.

Police say that they also found a jar of hash oil and cash in the apartment.

"I'm scared. Very scared," Lavoro told reporters following a hearing in a Williamson County courtroom this week. "I'm 19 years old and still have a whole life ahead of me. Take that into account."

According to the Associated Press, Lavoro's attorney, Jack Holmes, said that the brownies in question contained only a small amount THC–in the form of hash oil–and is not enough to justify a tough sentence.

"There was a total amount of 2.5 grams of THC found in all of that stuff. I expected a little bit more out of it, but that's what it is. That's about the equivalent to two and a half of those sugar things you find at a restaurant when you sit down," Holmes told KVUE-TV in Austin.

Holmes also claims that police officers lied about having permission to enter Lavoro's apartment in the first place, and is looking to have a hearing to suppress the evidence police gathered during their search.

If convicted of the charges as they now stand, Lovaro could face anywhere from 10 years to life in prison.

Prosecutors say that they really aren't trying to make an example out of Lavoro, but Williamson County has a reputation as one of the "Don't Mess with Texas"-est counties in the state–as well as a documented history of gross miscarriages of justice–so Lavoro may have reason to be very nervous indeed.

Meanwhile, in Colorado, pot brownies and hash oil are legal and helping to generate millions of dollars in tax revenue for the state's public school system.

Image via AP

Last night Nic Pizzolatto, a Writer and Visionary best known for his hit HBO series True Detective, released a statement denying that he is a plagiarist. It reads as though written by a committee of lawyers, your sophomore year college boyfriend, and some kind of PR firm that specializes in making you hateful to the entire internet:

Nothing in the television show True Detective was plagiarized. The philosophical thoughts expressed by Rust Cohle do not represent any thought or idea unique to any one author; rather these are the philosophical tenets of a pessimistic, anti-natalist philosophy with an historic tradition including Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, E.M. Cioran, and various other philosophers, all of whom express these ideas. As an autodidact pessimist, Cohle speaks toward that philosophy with erudition and in his own words. The ideas within this philosophy are certainly not exclusive to any writer.

As Joan Didion once put it: "Oh, wow."

Maybe you loved True Detective. (I liked it too! Bad ending though.) Maybe you understand that to be successful in Hollywood requires you to labor under enormous self-regard. And maybe you believe—like me—that it's a little much to call the transposition of phrases and concepts from non-fiction writing to a fictional setting "plagiarism."

But this statement tells us several unpalatable things about Nic Pizzolatto:

1. "An historic," for starters, announces Pizzolatto as a high-diction sort of guy. A guy who loves language. A guy who will say to you, should you use the wrong prepositional phrase while discussing some terrible thing you read on the internet, "Actually, modern usage..." Pizzolatto is a man who believes in precision, and correction.
2. Pizzolatto is the sort of guy who drops "anti-natalist philosophy" into a Hollywood press release, which means those words may also have appeared in his wedding vows.
3. Speaking of romance I am pretty sure Pizzolatto belongs to the exclusive order of Men Who Quote Philosophers At You While They're Breaking Up With You, and plainly belonged to its wider membership category of Men Who Quote Philosophers At You While They're Dating You, Usually At Random Intervals. In other words: men very anxious, usually, to let you know that they stand on the shoulders of previous Great Men (and Visionaries).
4. Here at Gawker.com, we of course expect that every serious writer take some pride in their work. That said, towards the end Pizzolatto actually seems to believe that the character he created has a consciousness of his own, capable of "speak[ing] towards a philosophy with erudition and in his own words."
5. While Pizzolatto is thus prepared to cite his fictional character's "erudition" in this ponderous little paragraph, he nowhere therein mentions the name "Thomas Ligotti," who is the writer he stands accused of actually copying.

This last is, actually, important. The most convincing claim in the long, rambling post at this "Lovecraft e-zine" is that Pizzolatto has been coy about acknowledging his (undeniable) Ligotti influences. In fact, in the Wall Street Journal article where Pizzolatto is said to have finally and fully acknowledged Ligotti—well, look closely and you'll see he didn't quite cop to the whole offense:

In episode one [of "True Detective"] there are two lines in particular (and it would have been nothing to re-word them) that were specifically phrased in such a way as to signal Ligotti admirers. Which, of course, you got.

"And it would have been nothing to re-word them," is the kind of sly troop maneuver one admires in the internecine warfare of middle-school girls. Nicely played, Pizzolatto.

Some friends of mine who have been following this small controversy seem to believe that Pizzolatto is in the thrall of lawyers, is afraid to admit anything lest he be hit with a giant copyright suit by Ligotti. I think they are out to lunch on several levels, not least because Ligotti is apparently a recluse and I doubt whatever lawyer he can afford to hire seriously intimidates the likes of HBO.

I prefer to rely on a much simpler theory, based on the above evidence: Pizzolatto has a giant ego which, fed on the fat diet of praise True Detective received earlier this year, now rages over the countryside of his soul. He got a bit sloppy here and probably meant no real harm by it. But to abandon his Great Infallible Genius Narrative now would be a death blow to his own self-image, so he cannot give an inch to any kind of criticism.

He should watch out. Many a greater artist than he was felled by this sort of towering self-love.

The fallout promises to be funny for the rest of us, though, at least.

[Image via Getty.]

Last weekend, 20-year-old James Taylor became a minor internet celebrity after his local news interview about hosting "West Michigan's biggest rave" went viral. But the true star of the Fox 17 segment was the passed out kid the cameraman panned to as Taylor described the party. That kid, later identified as 27-year-old Ray Hulin, spoke to Vocativ about his new-found fame earlier this week. "They made it look like I don't know how to handle my shit," Hulin said. "I've been way more fucked up before and was able to keep my composure."

Hulin, an aspiring rapper and member of hip-hop group PartieBoiz, elaborated on his partying philosophy to Vocativ. "I might be the smallest motherfucker in the crowd, but I'm always the loudest motherfucker with the biggest bottle," he said (Vocativ says he's 5'5). "Your party can have six kegs and 17 beer pong tables. I'll still come and shut the bitch down like I own the place."

So how exactly did such an experienced partier end up passed out on Taylor's floor? Steady drinking over about about twenty hours, according to Hulin.

"I was already turnt up before we got there," he said, adding that he and his friends Todd and Sam drank a bottle of liquor and several beers during the 25-minute drive to Taylor's home. "I knew I was gonna show these niggas what's up."

For Hulin, things just escalated from there. Via Vocativ:

At some point in the evening, Hulin says his swagger briefly got the best of him, and he passed out next to a parked car. When he came to, he had lost both his cellphones and couldn't find his friends. He was informed that Todd and Sam had split. "I said, 'Man, shut the fuck up,'" Hulin says. "But sure enough, they fuckin' left me there."

Hulin says he then did what any seasoned reveler in his situation would have done—he continued drinking. "I kept turnin' it up," he says. "Everybody was just showing me mad love."

Hulin kept turnin' it up until after sunrise Sunday morning, when, handle of Captain Morgan's in hand, he passed out on Taylor's floor. He woke to find himself being filmed by the Fox 17 crew.

"I said, 'Bitch, I'm a PartieBoi. I got a bottle of Captain Morgan in my hand. Does it look like I'm passed out?'" he said. "But I wasn't stressin' it. The sun was beatin' down out of the trees. It was pretty nice."

All in all, Hulin told Vocativ he was happy with his performance at Taylor's rave.

"I know how to handle a party, dude," he says. "And I feel like I handled this one party well."

[Image via Vocativ]

Dame Helen Mirren is perhaps best known for two things: her award-winning portrayals of queens and that one time she tried twerking. Dame Helen had some regrets about her mesmerizing performance during a game of charades at Harvard—mainly, that she felt she hadn't twerked to her full potential.

"It wasn't very good," she told USA Today. "I can twerk better than that. But I was more than embarrassed. I was absolutely mortified."

She got her chance earlier this week on Live With Kelly and Michael, and the sequel was at least as good as the original. But if Dame Helen feels she hasn't perfected her technique, she should definitely keep practicing anywhere there are cameras.

[H/T Tastefully Offensive]

On Monday former employees of SpaceX, Elon Musk's own private NASA, filed a proposed class action lawsuit. The complaint alleges that SpaceX "ordered the mass layoffs of between 200 and 400 workers" in late July without properly notifying them or paying the wages they were owed.

Law360 reports:

"Plaintiffs and other similarly situated employees also seek recovery of waiting time penalties as a result of defendants' failure to pay employees all wages due and owing at the time of their termination," the complaint says.

The plaintiffs allege that SpaceX's decision was "willful," according to the legal news site:

Among the fired workers were plaintiffs Bobby R. Lee and Bron Gatling, who worked as structural technicians in the company's Hawthorne facility. They claimed SpaceX's failure to pay the fired employees all wages earned before termination in accordance with the California Labor Code was willful.

SpaceX is based in Hawthorne, California, where those named plaintiffs worked. The company was recently offered $15 million in incentives to build a new launch facility in Texas. I have reached out to SpaceX and will update the post if I hear back.

To contact the author of this post, please email nitasha@gawker.com.

[Image via Getty]

This weekend on TV we've got hot takes about men in kilts, adorable but missing weathermen, one or more doomful prophecies about the end of days, and a complete lack of interest in fucking Shark Week.

FRIDAY

Throughout the afternoon there's a My Little Pony marathon on the Hub, and then at 8/7c. there's Jessie and Girl Meets World ("Girl Meets Popular") on Disney, and Masters of Illusion on the CW. At 9/8c. there's Ancient Aliens ("The God Particle") on H2, the NINTH season of Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, a new What Would You Do? and the heavy hitters: Dick Cavett's Watergate on PBS and the L Word: Mississippi documentary on Showtime. At 10/9c. is The Almighty Johnsons, In Search of Aliens ("The Mystery Of Loch Ness") a weirdly titled ("Never Too Young") Deadly Women on ID, and a new Say Yes To The Dress: The Big Day. Otherwise it's an hour of Jonah From Tonga (if you're into that; I'm not so much anymore, Chris Lilley is kind of over according to my subjective feelings and should take a little nap and come back later) but more importantly Soderbergh's medical period piece The Knick is finally coming to Cinemax.

SATURDAY

At 7/6c. there's a new Kid President, and then an hour after that , at 9/8c., shit gets real: Hell On Wheels, an hour of Hillbilly Blood on DA ("Cowboy ATV" makes sense, but what is murderous about "Lincoln Logs" such that you need a whole episode about it?) and the finale of My Haunted House ("Followed" and "A Portrait of Evil") on LMN, the Ghost Planes special on H2 (Is that like foo fighters, I wonder, or is it like... Planes who have died, but still have unfinished business in our realm?) and on Hallmark an original telefilm MOW called Stranded In Paradise. Clearly though anyone who is anyone will be watching the Outlander premiere on Starz.

Men in kilts: Your thoughts? Generally they are pretty good in the sack but I must say, most of them come with the anger. That ponytail kind of Male Feminist anger/entitlement that you don't see right away, but by the end of things it's all you see. Hot take.

At 10/9c. it's The Haunting Of Joe Pantoliano on LMN (by a soul patch, perhaps?) and an hour of FYI's Epic Meal Empire, which I don't know what that is or what that network is but the episode titles for this weekend floored me: "24 Hour Fatness" and "Poutine on the Ritz." Let's get that guy a raise! Science Channel has a "Human Lab Rats" episode of a show I'm given to understand is called Outrageous Acts Of Science: Most Outrageous Acts Of Science, which again, brava. So it's that or it's lesbian matchmaking on Nick Mom (for moms!) or it's the two-part finale of Life With La Toya, the latter chapter of which is titled "The Meltdown," so, get ready for La Toya Jackson to go OTT if that's even something you are capable of imagining.

If you are staying up until 2:30/1:30c. to watch Beware The Batman on Adult Swim, which by the way suck my dick Adult Swim, that's almost as bad as what Nick's doing to their greatest show, Legend of Korra, you can check out at 11/10c. two episodes of World's Weirdest Restaurants on FYI, the latter of which is titled "Ghosts & Dragons," so I am fucking sold, right then. No more questions, sir, I'll have one of those and be on my way. The only thing I find missing, in most restaurants, is that sense of the fantastique.

"Waiter, two more small-plates of this delicious dragon dish, please. And I'd like a refill on this ghost of this airplane as well, when you have a minute."

SUNDAY

At or around noonish on Bravo is the smash hit (for a weekend midday, but it is getting a shitload of buzz and I'm totally going to check it out, despite containing, one presumes, the Australians) Real Housewives Of Melbourne. Then Norman Reedus is going to be interviewed on some Ovation show at 7/6c., if you are into people that look like that. Dirty, I mean. I kind of am, but not I would say hugely. Then at 8/7c. it's the Teen Choice Awards on FOX, Real Housewives of New Jersey, or a very exciting, welcome, glorious episode of Big Brother. (Yes against all odds he's safe for now, thanks for asking. I guess prayer and/or The Secret has its place in our modern world after all.)

At 9/8c. it's two more episodes of that learned man's indulgence Bikinis & Boardwalks ("Bikinis And BASE Jumping," by the way), and the finale of Food Network Star in which a person will be suddenly a star? I never understood the end part of that show. I guess the one man came from it, but that's all I ever heard of. (Aarti Paarti? Is that real? Did I make that up entirely?) The Last Ship and Long Island Medium are about equal in quality from what I hear, and the Musketeers are still doing their whole BBC America thing. Ray Donovan versus the Witches of East End is something I would like to see get real brutal, I will be honest about that. The antepenultimate True Blood is upon us, but also a Discovery special called Shark of Darkness (?! interrobang), and Oprah will be finding out Where Now Are: Randy Jackson from American Idol, who just totally sucks; Danielle Staub from Real Housewives New Jersey, who sucks so much she went all the way through sucking to the point of being pretty amazing in her suckiness; and the most thrilling/fascinating gay weatherman of all time, known to his enemies and devotees alike as Sam Champion.

At 10/9c. there's Falling Skies, Ice Road Truckers ("The Lone Wolf"), a new episode of stupid The Strain, that weird sad show on Bravo about the grownups doing beauty pageants Game of Crowns ("Circus Display Of Affection" is an excellent but confusing title), the third episode of Manhattan on WGN, Masters of Sex, and a show debuting on the Weather Channel called Fat Guys in the Woods, and a new episode of the greatest show of all time, The Leftovers.

The fuck are we going to do when Leftovers is over? When the ones who are left over are: Us. It will be we who are the ones that are the left over leftovers. Just like the people on the show. I can wear all white and smoke cigarettes constantly. Just like high school all over again, minus the majority of the sex. Sounds awesome. Just kidding that sounds terrible. It's going to suck.

Finally at 11/10c. there's two excellently titled episodes of Escaping Alaska on TLC ("Hostile Hostel" and "Hollywood Bound"), versus John Oliver and something fishy called Shark After Dark on Discovery. In case you were still participating in Shark Week, which is a bullshit holiday made up by the shark industry to sell sharks and we all know it. Have a great weekend and keep away from sharks, and ghosts of airplanes. And ghosts of sharks. And shark airplanes that are quiet as ghosts and slice silently and selachimorphically through the dark night and before you know it they are shooting sharks at you and that's the last thing you ever fucking see.

[Image via ABC]

Morning After is a new home for television discussion online, brought to you by Gawker. What are you watching tonight? What are we missing out on? Recommendations and discussions down below.

With all the tech startups flooding the market, it would seem that America is more entrepreneurial than ever. But just the opposite is true. According to a pair of reports from The Brookings Institution, American entrepreneurship has been declining since the 1970s.

Brookings' reports reveal that American business has become steadily less dynamic in the past three decades. Instead of creating new companies, would-be entrepreneurs are increasing going to work for established corporations. And the rate of corporate consolidation is only making the statistic worse.

Now, for the first time since Brookings began tracking the data, more businesses are dying than being born in America.

As New York's Daily Intelligencer describes, all the media fanfare over startups is only masking the truth behind the state of entrepreneurship:

But the glitz, glamour, and big money of San Francisco — as well as the cultural potency of and media attention paid to start-ups — shroud a hard truth. The country is getting less entrepreneurial. In aggregate, firms are aging. People are starting fewer new businesses, and older businesses are doing better than their younger competitors. For all the talk of "disruption" in today's economy, it is better to be a big, old incumbent dinosaur than it is to be a lean, mean start-up.

This isn't just bad for potential founders, Brookings says. The trend curbing "creative destruction" has the potential to make the entire American workforce less productive:

Research has established that this process of "creative destruction" is essential to productivity gains by which more drive out less productive ones, new incumbents, and workers are better matched with firms. In other words, a dynamic economy constantly forces labor and capital to be put to better uses.

The problem isn't relegated to "The Paper Belt"—Silicon Valley's dismissive name for Middle America. Brookings reports that the entrepreneurial downturn transcends any particular state and region. The trend has been observed in all 50 states and "in all but a handful" of the 360 metropolitan areas tracked.

What's more? "This decline has been documented across a broad range of sectors in the U.S. economy, even in high-tech."

Brookings' reports are not all doom and gloom, however. The public policy organization notes that "business accelerators" are a "welcome development." And immigrants, being statistically twice as likely than native-born Americans to start businesses, could be allowed in the country in greater numbers to help reverse the trend.

To contact the author of this post, please email kevin@valleywag.com.

The world's oldest European eel died on Friday, according to the BBC, causing an uproar among Swedes who loved that old eel. The eel was born in 1859 and lived in a well.

The eel, who was known as Ale (confusing), lived in the southern town of Brantevik and was owned by Tomas Kjellman, who moved into the cottage next to the well with his family in 1962. Kjellman told Swedish paper The Local that "we always knew the housepet was included."

Guests had come to Kjellman's home for a crayfish party on Friday. Expecting to entertain his guests with a little "oldest eel ever!!" showing, he opened the well for all to see.

Via The Local:

But when they removed the lid from the well, they saw that the world's oldest eel had kicked the proverbial bucket.

"It was uncanny when we took off the lid and saw it in pieces. It had apparently been there for a while and had basically boiled."

The eel received no burial, but is in a freezer awaiting expert analysis - which may solve the riddle of how the sea creature got so incredibly old.

Rest in peace, Ale the old eel. You lived to 155, which is 148 years longer than most eels are expected to live.

[Image via The Local]

A tour bus driving in the mountainous Chinese region of Tibet fell off the side of a 30-foot cliff on Saturday, officials say, causing an unreported number of fatalities.

China's state news agency reported the accident but did not confirm the number of fatalities. Xinhua News Agency reported that bodies and survivors were pulled from the bus, sending the injured to a hospital in the capital of Lhasa.

According to a news report, the bus careened off the cliff when a pileup occurred on the road in the county of Nyemo.

Via the AP:

The road where Saturday's pileup occurred had a massive landslide earlier in the week, covering a 280-meter (yard) stretch of the road in debris, according to China's weather services.

Police estimate the bus had been carrying about 40 tourists at the time of the accident.

[Image via AP]