The US Department of Defense has learned nothing whatsoever in the battle to kill terror. Russia's air forces doing the job of destroying Jihadists in Syria taught the coalition nothing. The failed proxy war in Syria and asymmetrical failures broadcast via YouTube did not even crack the thick headed policies of America's war machine. Here is a new look at what I would call "designed strategic failure".

How else can the arms industry depend on the United States to provide a revenue machine if not by a built in mechanism for never ending war? Since the start of the Vietnam conflict "winning" has never been in the equation for Pentagon planning. Never has this been more evident than since the so-called "War on Terror" exacted by the Bush administration, and taken to its apex of idiocy by Barack Obama. About a year ago this author suggested the Russian Ministry of Defense "televise" the destruction of ISIL's money train, the black market oil shipped through Turkey from Syria and Kurdistan in northern Iraq. To the world's surprise, the Russia air war hit YouTube like a laser targeted smart bomb. Central Command, the coalition that was supposed to be killing ISIL from the air, was left gob smacked, flat footed, looking like fools with bad targeting, worse.

Vladimir Putin came to the assistance of Syria's President Assad and the people of Syria, and western mainstream media went crazy running interference for Obama and his allies in France, Britain, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other NATO and UN nations. Even in the face of verifiable proof the coalition was killing nothing but sand dunes, there was no course change. There was nothing learned except the fact the public is far too detached and confused. And in this BBC and the others take great advantage. Fast forward to Aleppo's fall, and with the jihadists utterly disenfranchised the Pentagon still reports more sand dune blasting. Russia obliterates Al Qaeda, Al Nusra, and ISIL, and the Obama administration pins medals on themselves. The DOD has to have officers with their heads down, shaking them and wondering; "Did I sign up for this?" America's wars are now a circus act, a staged dance where the choreographers punish footloose flights of athleticism. If the US Air Force, Navy or Marines were Broadway stars, no one would be in the audience.

Look at this latest DOD report on operations by the coalition. I'll share the Syria strikes with you and translate what the simple texts say:

A municipal council member of a Swedish town called Kalmar has resigned due to a Facebook post he made asking if someone could "shoot" America's new president, Donald Trump.

"I believed that Donald Trump would calm down after he became the president [of the US]. But how wrong I was! He exceeded my worst fears! Could anyone shoot him?" Swedish Social Democratic Party member Roland Peterson, a municipal official in Kalmar's Soedermoere district, wrote on his Facebook page on Sunday, though he removed it an hour later.

Nonetheless, Peterson decided to step down as member of both his party and the Soedermoere Municipal Council and Planning Board after making the post, announcing his resignation on Monday morning.

"After my blunder on Facebook, there is a risk that I will become a burden for the Social Democrats in Kalmar. I do not want it, so I chose to leave all my posts," Peterson wrote in a letter to his party members, as cited by the local Oestra Smaland newspaper.

The United States has provided coordinates of the terrorists' targets in the city of Al-Bab in Aleppo province for Russian airstrikes. After the reconaissance check, Russia and two coalition jets have conducted joint airstrikes on the Daesh targets in the region.

"On January 22, the Russian command center at the Hmeymim airbase has received coordinates of Daesh targets in Al-Bab, Aleppo province, via the 'direct line' from the US-led coalition headquarters. After further data verification with the assistance of unmanned aircraft and space reconaissance, the Russian Aerospace Forces and two jets of the international coalition have conducted airstrikes on the terrorists' targets," the statement said.

As a result, several ammunition depots, military hardware and fuel products were destroyed.

When Daryl Glenn Pawlak logged into a large child pornography website and downloaded images using his work computer, he was charged with receipt and possession of child pornography.

The operator of the website that was exploiting children, however, was not arrested.

That's because it was the FBI. And federal prosecutors are defending the agency's decision to secretly hijack and peddle child porn for two weeks as part of a sting operation.

During that time, tens of thousands of images of child pornography were uploaded to the site.

"Not only was the government the largest distributor of child pornography ... it was also the largest exploiter of children," Pawlak's attorney said in a court filing. "This conduct is the essence of outrageousness, and a serious need for deterrence exists."

The case has ignited debate among legal scholars and defense attorneys about internet privacy and the FBI's decision to keep such a website up and running while more children were harmed.

Dozens of defense attorneys have filed motions to suppress evidence from the controversial child pornography sting, called Operation Pacifier. In some cases, federal judges have granted those motions. But most attempts to get charges thrown out have failed, legal experts say, even though some judges have ruled that the government violated the law and acted inappropriately.

Across continents there are many who see themselves as the losers from globalisation, but the ideological vehicles for protest differ markedly from region to region

It is an era of instability and disintegration which began in the Middle East and North Africa in 2011 and in Europe and the US in 2016. These regions are very different, but their recent political convulsions have basic features in common, notably a feeling shared by people from the Mississippi to the Euphrates that they are unhappy with the status quo. Likewise, political elites from Damascus to Washington DC have demonstrably underestimated their own unpopularity and the narrowness of their political base.

Inequality has increased everywhere with politically momentous consequences, a development much discussed as a reason for the populist-nationalist upsurge in western Europe and the US. But it has also had a significant destabilising impact in the wider Middle East. Impoverished Syrian villagers, who once looked to the state to provide jobs and meet their basic needs at low prices, found in the decade before 2011 that their government no longer cared what happened to them. They poured in their millions into gimcrack housing on the outskirts of Damascus and Aleppo, cities whose richer districts looked more like London or Paris. Unsurprisingly, it was these same people, formerly supporters of the ruling Baath party, who became the backbone of the popular revolt. Their grievances were not dissimilar from those of unemployed coal miners in former Democratic Party strongholds in West Virginia who voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump.

President Vladimir Putin has approved the idea to grant the best routes to airlines that include Russian-built aircraft in their fleet.

"As for the most profitable routes, it's a nice bonus for airlines buying aircraft of Russian production," said the President during a meeting with Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin.

"To those companies that buy Russian aircraft, we will provide the necessary benefits, including profitable routes, as well as special incentives of an economic nature, including those related to the leasing of aircraft. We are working in compliance with the plan, and I believe that in the early spring we will be ready to report the first results," Rogozin said, as quoted by TASS news agency.

According to Rogozin, these are flights to Russia's Far East and countries popular with Russian tourists.

With a stroke of a pen, President Donald Trump has unraveled the Trans-Pacific Partnership, withdrawing the US from the controversial free-trade pact. Without Washington's participation, the TPP would have to be renegotiated or scrapped altogether.

The largest global trade agreement in 20 years, the TPP would have included the United States, Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam. It was championed by former President Barack Obama as a way to open Asian markets for American goods and create a trade bloc to counter China.

Opposition to the TPP was one of the key planks of Trump's presidential campaign, with the billionaire businessman calling the trade pact a "potential disaster" for the US. He said he would prefer bilateral trade deals with individual TPP countries instead. Monday's executive order signaled the new administration's determination to address its priorities quickly.

Vietnam backed out of the pact in November, citing uncertainty created by Trump's election and the refusal of the US Congress to ratify the TPP.

In a famous exchange between a high official at the court of George W. Bush and journalist Ron Suskind, the official - later acknowledged to have been Karl Rove - takes the journalist to task for working in "the reality-based community." He defined that as believing "that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." Rove then asserted that this was no longer the way in which the world worked:

"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

-- Ron Suskind, NY Times Magazine, Oct. 17, 2004

This declaration became popular as an illustration of the hubris of the Bush-Cheney government. But we could also see it as fulfilled prophecy. Fulfilled in a manner that no journalist at that time would have deemed possible. Yes, the neoconservatives brought disrepute upon themselves because of the disaster in Iraq. Sure, opposition to the reality Rove had helped create in that devastated country became a first rung on the ladder that could lead to the presidency, as it did for Barack Obama. But the neocons stayed put in the State Department and other positions closely linked to the Obama White House, where they became allies with the liberal hawks in continuing 'spreading democracy' by overthrowing regimes. America's mainstream news and opinion purveyors, without demurring, accommodated the architects of reality production overseen by Dick Cheney.

This did not end when Obama became president, but in fact with seemingly ever greater eagerness they gradually made the CIA/neocon-neoliberal created reality appear unshakably substantial in the minds of most newspaper readers and among TV audiences in the Atlantic basin. This was most obvious when attention moved to an imagined existential threat posed by Russia supposedly aimed at the political and 'Enlightenment' achievements of the West. Neoconservatives and liberal hawks bent America's foreign-policy entirely to their ultimate purpose of eliminating a Vladimir Putin who had decided not to dance to Washington's tune so that he might save the Russian state, which had been disintegrating under his predecessor and Wall Street's robber barons.

With President Obama as a mere spectator, the neocon/liberals could - without being ridiculed - pass off as a popular revolution the coup d'état they fomented in the Ukraine. And because of an unquestioned Atlanticist faith, which holds that without the policies of the United States the world cannot be safe for people of the Atlantic basin, the European elites that determine policy or comment on it joined their American counterparts in endorsing that reality.

Eight years ago, Barack Obama walked into the White House after raising the hopes of a country that an alternative to the brutality of the Bush years, and the desultory character of American politics more broadly, was possible. Those hopes were quickly dashed.

From his earliest days in office to his last, Obama as president was light years away from Obama on the campaign stump. This is the reality of governance, of course. And the obstructionism he faced from Republicans and the Right was historically unprecedented. But Obama's presidency will be remembered for the tremendous opportunities he squandered and the progressive national moods he refused, or was incapable of, capitalizing on.

At the moments when Americans were ready for bold action, he insisted on remaining "reasonable"; in response to ever-expanding inequality and deepening misery, Obama offered small-bore technocratic fixes.

The progress he was able to achieve should not be ignored. But it's impossible to look at Obama's list of achievements without being struck by how few and how small they are compared to what might have been.

On the final day of Obama's presidency, Jacobin contributors assess his legacy on a range of issues.

Donald Trump started off his first full day as President of the United States on Saturday, Jan. 21st by paying a visit to the CIA headquarters in Langley, VA.

This event is of great significance - not only because of the rarity of presidential visits to the CIA - but because of what Donald Trump said to the assembled CIA employees as he spoke in the main entrance hall of the agency's HQ.

Though most of his remarks, lasting about 15 minutes, were conciliatory and obviously aimed at burying the hatchet with those in the agency who spearheaded the Russia-themed defamation campaign against Trump, towards the end of his statement he dropped a not-so-subtle hint that further opposition to his mandate would not be tolerated.

Remarking on the lack of space in the hall to accommodate the audience, the president suggested redesigning the CIA HQ without "columns."