Society

The Climate Apocalypse is upon us. More carbon monoxide has been discharged into the atmosphere in the last 50 years than in the whole of human history that went before. Carbon traps heat and the world is getting hotter. Heat holds water vapor and so rainfall is getting more frequent while heat waves last longer. Ice at the poles melts and coastal cities face inundation as sea levels rise. But the doom confidently predicted by many climate scientists around the world is being met by optimism among other scientists who are employing innovative technologies that may transform the debate and offer hope for us all. These technological breakthroughs will impact all aspects of climate change from carbon emissions to food production and all forms of energy.

Eighteen years ago, I was only a child. My first indication that something bad had happened on September 11, 2001 was that a birthday party my whole class had been slated to attend was canceled. Instead of heading to a celebration, I waited with the rest of my classmates for our parents to come and take us home. Except my mother didn’t take me home. We went straight to the supermarket. I remember watching, mouth agape, as my mother piled what seemed like hundreds of boxes of spaghetti, cases of water, and canned goods into the wagon. None of us knew what would come next, and she wanted to be prepared. That commitment to preparation came from fear. A fear that was rational and justified, and which grew out of a realistic sense that the sands had shifted. We were at war.

The Great American Vaping Panic is reaching its ghastly conclusion. As I write this, five people have died in hospital and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is investigating 450 reports of people going into seizures after vaping. Politicians are demanding a renewed clampdown on an e-cigarette industry that was being blamed for a youth ‘tobacco epidemic’ long before these events unfurled. The market leader, Juul, is under investigation by the FDA, its products are banned in the company’s hometown of San Francisco and it may not be long before they are banned nationwide. Moral panics rarely come out of nowhere and there is a grain of truth in this one. Dozens of people, mainly young men, have been hospitalized after vaping in recent weeks.

Ever since being beaten and robbed by Antifa in Portland in June, I have continued to receive threats of violence, which have prompted attention from police. But the scale of the abuse I received on Tuesday morning after waking up was unprecedented. The source of the rage? A Daily Beast hit piece headlined, 'Right-wing star Andy Ngo exits Quillette after damning video surfaces.' This was followed by another story in the Washington Examiner, shared in a tweet, which said I was out at Quillette 'after controversial video surfaces showing him doing nothing to stop or report violent attack.' This was followed by more hit pieces on VICE and Media Matters.

Andy Ngo has flown the Quillette nest. The Portland-based provocateur, famous for his hate crime-debunking Twitter threads, CCTV coverage of Antifa protests and narrative-driven writing on Islam, left his role as subeditor for the Australian Intellectual Dark Web magazine this week. The circumstances of his departure are unclear, but the timing is suspect: last Thursday a Portland Mercury reporter circulated a video that shows Ngo near to members of the far-right group Patriot Prayer immediately prior to a violent clash with Antifa. Ngo himself is yet to comment. https://twitter.com/alex_zee/status/1164406638519803905 Quillette editor Claire Lehmann said this was a coincidence.

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.