August | 2016 | Praxis

The Method Behind Julian Assange’s Attacks on Hillary Clinton

IN RECENT MONTHS, the WikiLeaks Twitter feed has started to look more like the stream of an opposition research firm working mainly to undermine Hillary Clinton than the updates of a non-partisan platform for whistleblowers. […] But it should come as no surprise to anyone who looks back at the founding principles of WikiLeaks that Assange — who has clearly stated his distaste for the idea of the former secretary of state becoming president — would make aggressive use of leaked documents to try to…

Trump Campaign Finding the Candidate Is His Own Worst Enemy

Nearly two months later, the effort to save Mr. Trump from himself has plainly failed. He has repeatedly signaled to his advisers and allies his willingness to change and adapt, but has grown only more volatile and prone to provocation since then, clashing with a Gold Star family, making comments that have been seen as inciting violence and linking his political opponents to terrorism. Advisers who once hoped a Pygmalion-like transformation would refashion a crudely effective political showman into a plausible American president now increasingly…

How Scammer Consultants Cannibalized the Tea Party Movement

As we watch the Republican Party tear itself to shreds over Donald Trump, perhaps it’s time to take note of another conservative political phenomenon that the GOP nominee has utterly eclipsed: the Tea Party. The Tea Party movement is pretty much dead now, but it didn’t die a natural death. It was murdered—and it was an inside job. In a half decade, the spontaneous uprising that shook official Washington degenerated into a form of pyramid scheme that transferred tens of millions of dollars from rural,…

Yemen, Not Syria or Iraq, Is Obama’s Worst Foreign Policy Mistake

The people most upset with President Obama on Syria are those hawks that have wanted him to do much more, and so they blame him for the actions that other states and groups have taken when he has no control over what these other actors do. Meanwhile, when the Obama administration directly and actively participates in creating one of the gravest humanitarian crises of this century, as it has in Yemen, the same people that berate him over Syria have nothing to say about that….

The Life and Death of Gopher, the Internet Before the Web

On March 18, in a conference room of the hotel, Berners-Lee presented one possible breakthrough: the World Wide Web. It was evening. Many of the 530 conference attendees had already gone to the bar or to dinner. To the curious who stayed behind, Berners-Lee explained that the Web could be used to connect all the information on the internet through hyperlinks. You could click on a word or a phrase in a document and immediately retrieve a related document, click again on a phrase in…

American Jews’ Opinions Toward Israel Shifted As Netanyahu Embraced the GOP

Gradually but inexorably, the nature of the American Jewish attachment to Israel began to change, to become more and more the province of the Orthodox. I do not begrudge the Orthodox their dominance. They didn’t steal Zionism from anyone. To a certain degree, non-Orthodox Jews have abdicated it. Regardless, the net effect is clear. Survey data tells us that Orthodox Jews in this country are twice as likely as Conservative Jews, four times as likely as Reform Jews, and eight times as likely as unaffiliated…

Contrary to Myth, Trump Isn’t Succeeding With Lower-Income White Voters

In 2012, Romney won 62 percent of noncollege-educated white voters. The latest NBC-Wall Street Journal poll showed that Trump isn’t even winning a clear majority with the group, with just 49 percent backing him. A McClatchy/Marist poll puts him even lower, at 46 percent. This is a reversal from earlier in the summer, when Trump’s support among the group was in the 60s, higher than Romney’s, though not by leaps and bounds. Much of the analysis of Trump’s support was based on the fact that…

What Does the Future Hold for Republicans for Hillary?

Will the old neoconservatives/new neoliberals who support Clinton instead of Trump ever come back to the Republican party after the election? It depends on three unknowns. If Trump loses big, the neoliberals will remind Republican Trumpers that they had warned them about their populist folly. The neoliberals will seek to expunge populists and to rebuild a defeated Republican party in their own image as an improved version of the conservative establishment represented by the likes of Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush. They may re-emerge as…

3D Printing Is Coming Soon to a Restaurant Near You

Back in 2013, when NASA was still setting its sights on a human mission to Mars, a team of Texas researchers won a federal grant to build a 3D printer that could pump out customized food in space. The natural first choice for a demo? Pizza, of course. But just after the first version was finished and a second grant was due to arrive, researcher Anjan Contractor and his team at the Systems and Materials Research Corporation in Austin, Texas, received the discouraging news that…

Survey Finds Many Black Religious Leaders Illegally Campaigning for Hillary Clinton

It is illegal for clergy to support or oppose political candidates from the pulpit. Houses of worship can host candidate forums and voter-registration drives; pastors and rabbis and imams can even bend the rules a little to advocate “as individuals” at conventions or other events. But for more than 60 years, religious groups have been forbidden from electioneering. Apparently, a lot of pastors don’t pay attention to this rule. According to a newsurvey from Pew Research Center, roughly 9 percent of people who have attended…

Understanding the present is the key to the future