Category Archives: General News

An extensive study that professors and data scientists at Harvard and M.I.T. conducted has concluded that Breitbart News does not represent the “alt-right,” undercutting the legitimacy of left-wing activists, Democrats, reporters in the legacy media, Never Trumpers, and establishment Republican bobbing heads and mouthpieces who rushed after Charlottesville to reflexively smear, malign, and defame Breitbart News as an “alt-right” outlet associated with white supremacists and Nazis.

In a New York Times magazine cover story explaining how there is “no real precursor for Breitbart” of an outlet that has so quickly emerged to “dominate the political conversation in a pivotal election,” renowned essayist Wil S. Hylton spoke to Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler, who has studied the “rise and influence” of Breitbart News in addition to the news media ecosystem with colleagues at Harvard and M.I.T. with a “colossal database.” Their Media Cloud database has at least ten years worth of articles and websites that enables them to study how information and news travel.

According to Hylton, “the last thing Yochai Benkler noted before” Hylton “left his office at Harvard was that his team had performed a textual analysis of all the stories in their database, and they found a surprising result”:

“One thing that came out very clearly from our study is that Breitbart is not talking about these issues in the same way you would find on the extreme right,’’ he said. ‘‘They don’t use the same language you find on sites like VDARE and The Daily Stormer’’ — two sites connected to the white-nationalist alt-right movement. He paused for a moment, then added: ‘‘Breitbart is not the alt-right.’’

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Jesse Watters gives advice to ‘Duck Dynasty’ star about new contributor role.

Original source.

Pat Buchanan: Feds shouldn’t be stirring up animosity in Moscow, elsewhere.

Though “Bibi” Netanyahu won re-election last week, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations will still look into whether the State Department financed a clandestine effort to defeat him.

Reportedly, State funneled $350,000 to an American NGO called OneVoice, which has an Israeli subsidiary, Victory 15, that collaborated with U.S. operatives to bring Bibi down.

If we are now secretly pumping cash into the free elections of friendly countries, to dump leaders President Obama dislikes, Americans have a right to know why we are using Cold War tactics against democracies.

After World War II, my late colleague on CNN’s “Crossfire,” Tom Braden, delivered CIA cash to democratic parties in Europe imperiled by communist parties financed from Moscow.

But that was done to combat Stalinism when Western survival was at stake in a Cold War that ended in 1991.

Hopefully, after looking into OneVoice and V15, the Senate will expand its investigation into a larger question: Is the U.S. using NGOs to subvert regimes around the world? And, if so, who decides which regimes may be subverted?

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“Politics is downstream from culture.” — Andrew Breitbart

5) “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it.” – Nancy Pelosi

Nancy Pelosi’s shameful utterance about Obamacare has become the standard in America over the last few years. Enormous bills are put together in secret; the public is deliberately misled about what the legislation does; politicians don’t even bother to read what they’re voting on and then it takes years for the courts to finish ruling on what the hundreds of pages of tortured legalisms actually mean. That’s no way to run a country and it’s no wonder that both politicians and the law itself are increasingly held in contempt if that’s the best we can do.

4) “The real story is that our social safety net was supposed to be like one of those, ‘Take a Penny, Leave a Penny’ tills that depend on the honor and neighborliness of a community. And we don’t have that community. What we have is a fragmented mess of givers and takers who are not the same people.” — Daniel Greenfield

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“We’re cautiously optimistic; cautious because of all the technical and other challenges we’ve got, but optimistic because we’re confident in the analysis,” said Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, the agency leading the search. “But it’s just a very big area that we’re looking at.”

After a four-month hiatus, the hunt for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is about to resume in a desolate stretch of the Indian Ocean, with searchers lowering new equipment deep beneath the waves in a bid to finally solve one of the world’s most perplexing aviation mysteries.

The GO Phoenix, the first of three ships that will spend up to a year hunting for the wreckage far off Australia’s west coast, is expected to arrive in the search zone Sunday, though weather could delay its progress. Crews will use sonar, video cameras and jet fuel sensors to scour the water for any trace of the Boeing 777, which disappeared March 8 during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board.

The search has been on hold for months so crews could map the seabed in the search zone, about 1,800 kilometers (1,100 miles) west of Australia. The 60,000-square kilometer (23,000-square mile) search area lies along what is known as the “seventh arc” — a stretch of ocean where investigators believe the aircraft ran out of fuel and crashed, based largely on an analysis of transmissions between the plane and a satellite.

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As new wars and civil unrests seem to be flaring up every week, we look for the only countries in the world that could be considered ‘conflict-free’.

With the crisis in Gaza, the rise of Islamist militants in Iraq and Syria and the international stand-off ongoing in Ukraine, it can sometimes feel like the whole world is at war.

But experts believe this is actually almost universally the case, according to a think-tank which produces one of the world’s leading measures of “global peacefulness” – and things are only going to get worse.

It may make for bleak reading, but of the 162 countries covered by the Institute for Economics and Peace’s (IEP’s) latest study, just 11 were not involved in conflict of one kind or another.

Worse still, the world as a whole has been getting incrementally less peaceful every year since 2007 – sharply bucking a trend that had seen a global move away from conflict since the end of the Second World War.

The UK, as an example, is relatively free from internal conflict, making it easy to fall to thinking it exists in a state of peace. But recent involvement in foreign fighting in the likes of Afghanistan, as well as a fairly high state of militarisation, means Britain actually scores quite poorly on the 2014 Global Peace Index, coming 47th overall.

Then there are countries which are involved in no actual foreign wars involving deaths whatsoever – like North Korea – but which are fraught by the most divisive and entrenched internal conflicts.

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It isn’t West Virginia, which came in dead last, as it has for 5 years in a row now.

Move over, Hawaii. North Dakota is now the happiest state in the union.

For the first time in five years, Hawaii does not rank highest in Gallup’s annual well-being poll. Instead, North Dakota takes the top spot, with a well-being score of 70.4 out of 100, according to a new report released on Feb. 20 by the polling agency.

A state known for icy winters and oil drilling may seem like an odd candidate for the happiest place to live, especially compared to tropical Hawaii, but the upset came as no surprise to Dan Witters, research director of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index.

“Historically, it’s had a lot of top-10 rankings,” Witters told LiveScience, referring to North Dakota. “It’s never been No. 1, but it’s been way up there.”

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Breitbart News launched two new verticals on Sunday—”Breitbart London” and “Breitbart Texas”—that are the first steps in a multi-year expansion effort that will bridge the gap between global and regional news at a time when the rise of anti-establishment forces in politics and new media are threatening the old political and media order.

James Delingpole, formerly of the Daily Telegraph, and Raheem Kassam, from TrendingCentral.com, will lead Breitbart London, which will have a staff of 10 with 100 contributors already lined up to grow the site. Breitbart’s Brandon Darby will lead Breitbart Texas with a team of contributors that will cover immigration, crony capitalism, education, business, and the the impact the Tea Party is having in Texas politics.

“We look at London and Texas as two fronts in our current cultural and political war,” Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon said. “There is a growing global anti-establishment revolt against the permanent political class at home, and the global elites that influence them, which impacts everyone from Lubbock to London.”

Bannon said that Breitbart News is “determined to be the platform that reports on this movement every day in every region.”

Breitbart News President and CEO Larry Solov emphasized that the “anti-establishment approach of Breitbart News and its knack for reporting the truth that others don’t want to tell has captured a growing audience unconstrained by geographic borders.”

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