Society

Donald Trump is the Cyrus of our era. He is the most pro-Israel president the United States has ever had. He clearly likes and admires Jews. He’s more accepting of his daughter’s faith than most non-Orthodox Jews would be if their daughter went frum. Now, it may be that a philo-Semite is someone who got the memo but read it backwards. But after the bracing refresher course of the Obama years, I’ll take a philo-Semitic, Mar-a-Lago opening, pro-Israel, embassy-moving, Golan-annexing president any day. And so should American Jews. ‘I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat — it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty,’ Trump said. He’s a studiously crude speaker and actor, and tremendously vain too, but he’s only pretending to be stupid.

The Mueller report did not bring down Donald Trump. The president will not be impeached before the 2020 election, and it is clear – in spite of the hopes of the good men, women and nonbinary soldiers of the Resistance – that he is not a Russian superbot manufactured in a cutting-edge information warfare lab in the dark belly of the Kremlin. Trump is not the Manchurian president. An ominous question emerges for liberals: who is Donald Trump, if he is not Vladimir Putin’s dogsbody? What the hell are we going to do with him? Why is he still fouling up our government? The pack howls, but in the four years since Trump descended the golden escalator from the world of television entertainment to the world of political entertainment, they have yet to catch him.

As a member of the marketing team for Google’s once-hyped Google+ social network (remember that?) I can recall only one occasion when I encountered concerns about objectionable or controversial content. It was circa 2012, and it involved beer. Craft breweries and homebrew enthusiasts had created a pleasant little home for themselves on Google+, using its Hangouts video technology to run tutorials and virtual tastings, even announcing new collaborations with other breweries around the world. To a product marketer, this was thrilling: actual user engagement!

Let's get ready to rumble! Two viral sensations are squaring off on the Twitter. In the blue corner, from Massachusetts Bay, Barstool Sports president and whole pizza-eating aficionado David 'Davey Pageviews' Portnoy. And in the red corner, all the way from the Bronx, it's fiery congresswoman Alexandria 'The Red Scare' Ocasio-Cortez. The spat concerns the hottest new trend in New York media besides developing a substance abuse problem and getting fired: unionizing. Nothing offers comfort to an overcaffeinated 23-year-old fresh out of a liberal arts college quite like a big 'union' laptop sticker on a battered MacBook Air. Springsteen would be proud. The latest cluster of journavists to attempt this strategy hail from sports site The Ringer, a Barstool competitor.

‘Janna Jihad’ doesn’t sound like a real name. It sounds like the nom de porn of an actress in some recondite cinematic genre in which the explosive belt is kept on, but not much else. Or perhaps the nom de guerre adopted by one of those Europeans who popped out to the shops one afternoon in 2015 and then turned up in ISIS territory ‘Janna Jihad’ promises a hybrid of the two great spectacles of our time, pornography and terrorism — a brand where Janna Hicks, American protagonist of spectacles like Sneaky Selfie Student and MILF Hunter, meets Abu Jihad, Palestinian protagonist of spectacles like the hijacking of a bus in Israel, which led to the murder of 37 passengers, 12 of them children. In fact, Janna Jihad’s name really is Janna Jihad.

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Back in the early 1990s Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africa’s president, outlined the new ANC government’s strategy to deal with the whites: 'it would be like boiling a frog alive, which is done by raising the temperature very slowly. Being cold-blooded, the frog does not notice the slow temperature increase, but if the temperature is raised suddenly, the frog will jump out of the water.' As Dr Oriani-Ambrosini put it, 'He meant that the black majority would pass laws transferring wealth, land, and economic power from white to black slowly and incrementally, until the whites lost all they had gained in South Africa, but without taking too much from them at any given time to cause them to rebel or fight.

‘They hate my views on Donald Trump,’ Alan Dershowitz says of the New Yorker. ‘They hate my views on Benjamin Netanyahu, and they hate my views on Israel.’ This week, the New Yorker ran a long-awaited hit piece on Dershowitz by Connie Bruck. Dershowitz wrote an article anticipating the attack here. It’s not clear why Bruck took a year to write her story. Its most damaging claim has circulated for several years: that Dershowitz, the erstwhile friend and lawyer of convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, had sex with Virginia Roberts, a teenager procured by Epstein. This story failed to get to court, despite Roberts, now known as Virginia Giuffre, engaging David Boies as her lawyer.

America is at war in cyberspace and is losing badly. The US has some of the world’s most advanced cyber weapons, but no political will or a coherent national strategy. As a result, America’s enemies see a fatal weakness, and are exploiting it every day. In July, the Senate Intelligence Committee reported that Russia hacked into the electoral systems of all 50 US states. The committee did not find that the Russians directly interfered with the voting, but is clear that they have developed that capability. 'While the Committee does not know with confidence what Moscow’s intentions were, Russia may have been probing vulnerabilities in voting systems to exploit later,’ the report said.

In Mother Jones, Zohar Lazar posits that the recent spate of pedophilia conspiracies are merely a reactionary response to a changing social order. As progressive policies take hold in America, the conservative fringe, Zohar claims, is freaking out by inventing false conspiracies about secret pedophilia rings. But it’s not all fantasy. A decades-long progressive policy push for the loosening of sexual taboos and legal constraints has drastic implications for children’s rights and safety.

The decision by Microsoft to invest $1 billion in OpenAI, a company jointly founded by Elon Musk, brings closer the time when machines threaten to replace humans in any tasks that humans do today. OpenAI, which was founded just four years ago, has pioneered a range of technologies which have pushed the frontiers of massive data processing in defiance of the physical and computer capabilities that governed such developments for generations. Now, with the investment from Microsoft, the pace of technological change is likely to accelerate rapidly. Today, Artificial Intelligence is at a level of what is known as 'weak AI’ and relies on humans to create the algorithms which allow for the crunching of massive amounts of data to produce new and often predictive results.

If you do ever find yourself in Moscow with a spare morning or afternoon to discharge, might I recommend a visit to the Museum of Cosmonautics? Roosting below the grandly named ‘Monument to the Conquerors of Space’, the frigid, rather shabby rooms of this museum contain exhibits that are as moving as anything that’s ever been placed in a glass box for tourists to gawp at. When you consider that Soviet Cosmonauts ‘touched the face of God’ using crude, dangerous technology that contained less processing power than the average contemporary fridge – when you consider the sheer bravery of men like Gagarin, Belyayev and Komarov – the major response is (and ought to be) pride. Pride on a human level, that is to say, a species-level pride.