Key moments of 2018 that will shape next year

2018 spelled some dramatic changes in political landscapes all around the world. We take a look at the events that will shape international politics for years. 

 

The outgoing year has made the world much more turbulent, with a major conflict brewing in the Middle East, a radical change of government in one of world's largest democracies, and a change of guard in the European leadership. On the bright side, there was no war in Korea.

Brexit anxiety

On the other side of the Atlantic, the UK this year tried to get favorable divorce terms from Brussels, but the shark lawyers on the continent prove to be faster, smarter and meaner. PM Theresa May finally decided not to test the Brexit deal in a vote at home this year, and the potential of a no-deal break-up seems all too realistic.

The cabinet has been stumbling between counting resignation letters and fending off no-confidence votes by reassuring the public that thousands of soldiers were ready to keep Britain from becoming a post-Apocalyptic nightmare. Keep calm and blame Russia, as they say.

'Saudi reformist' turns 'Mr. Bone Saw'

Mohammad bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, went on a charm offensive in the West this year, having consolidated his power at home in 2017. The smiling royal came with driving licenses for women and domestic tickets for 'The Emoji Movie' in his right hand, and multibillion dollar arms contracts in his left. Paid lobbyists and wine-and-dined journalists marched in lockstep, and the few anti-war protesters failed to rain on the parade.

Then came the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, with all its denials, cover-ups and leaked grisly details. The acronym MBS, as the crown prince is often referred to, was mockingly deciphered as “Mister Bone Saw” by critics. And that was such a bummer for so many people. How do you tell your voters that your government respects liberal values and still sell arms to a Mister Bone Saw? How do you make readers forget you wrote all those sweet things about the reformist prince, who likely ordered a fellow columnist slaughtered? Well, maybe some good will come out of it if the outrage brings about an end to the bloodbath in Yemen.

Nuclear treaty termination

Moscow's fears of NATO military encroachment were fueled by Washington after an announcement that the US was going to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF). Of the three cornerstone nuclear deals between the US and Russia, one – the anti-ballistic missile (ABM) treaty – was scrapped by George W Bush. INF seems almost certain to follow suit next year. Some officials in the US are talking about pulling out of New START too. Moscow's response to the looming new arms race is making its nukes invulnerable.

The Skripal affair

The West has doubled down on portraying the Kremlin as the secret mastermind behind everything bad happening to them. Mass protests hit France? Russia is definitely behind it! As the State Department spokeswoman soon to represent the US at the United Nations once put it, “Russia has long arms and lots of tentacles.”

The most bizarre case for Russia being bad came this year from Britain, where according to London, a couple of Russian secret agents tried to assassinate a turncoat with a nerve poison, which failed to kill him despite being ‘military-grade.’ Diplomatic relations between Moscow and London are now reduced to No. 10 shouting "you're guilty” and Kremlin residing in perpetual confusion and denial. The scandal also gave us RT’s most talked about interview of the decade.

Korea's Olympic truce and beyond

In 2017, the world was bracing for a new shooting war in the Korean Peninsula – an event that would likely cause tens of thousands of civilian casualties in the first few days alone and possibly would see the use of nuclear weapons for the first time since World War II. But this didn't happen.

Instead, South Korea hosted the Winter Olympic Games, with a Northern delegation present and wowing the world with their highly-coordinated rooting routines. Trump met Kim, Kim met Moon, and everybody was saying the crisis was averted. Experts however say it was simply postponed, because the basis for the conflict in the region persists. For all we know, officials in Seoul and Pyongyang are simply waiting for a time when they could speak openly about their differences without risking some rash decisions from the 45th US President.

US crackdown on Iran

Washington's warmongering rhetoric shifted from Pyongyang to Tehran. The neocon dream team in the White House flipped the finger at the world and pulled out of the nuclear deal with Iran. As other signatories were scrambling to salvage it, the US re-imposed economic sanctions that had been lifted under its terms. As European governments were assuring their businesses that Iranian market was still OK, the Americans were twisting the arms of the likes of Airbus and SWIFT and succeeded in scaring them off. 

Trump's war

Trump is yet to honor the long tradition that says each US president has to start at least one new war. He does seem determined to compensate threefold in international trade. Washington exchanged tit-for-tat tariff salvos with Beijing throughout the year, and neither side seems willing to give up. Trade wars are not as easy to win as the US President claimed once on Twitter. But at least he got an ostensibly new trade deal with Mexico and Canada to brag about.

Merkel wraps up political career after re-election

Last year, veteran German leader Angela Merkel secured her fourth term as chancellor. The victory was somewhat Pyrrhic, however. The right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party who had not won a single seat in 2013, jumped to become the third most represented party in the Bundestag, and has gained ground in all German states. Their surge stems to a large degree from Merkel's decision to keep doors open for asylum-seekers, who came to Europe in their hundreds of thousands in 2015.

So this year after a bitter political crisis in summer, Frau Bundeskanzlerin announced that the current term would be her last. Merkel is set to retire in 2021 as one of Germany's three longest-serving chancellors. And it will be without any doubt an end of an era for the entire continent, where Germany under Merkel was an unofficial leader.

Macron vies for EU leadership, gets Yellow Vests

As Germany left the international limelight to deal with domestic problems, France under Emmanuel Macron made a bid for the vacant position. The French president became a leading voice in publicly opposing Trump's nationalism and advocating European integration.

But this international agenda may be undermined by Macron's shrinking popularity at home. His painful economic reforms, a scandal involving his security aide, and occasional tone-dead statements have contributed to growing resentment in France. The anti-Macron mood erupted by year's end as the so-called Yellow Vests mass protest, which started as an expression of contempt over a fuel price hike and became a violent riot against the man at the helm. The presidency seems to have survived only through small concessions and a strong police response.

Dictator-parsing president, black apartheid, Orthodox schism

In Latin America, a crucial election in world's fifth-largest democracy this year became symbolic for the continent's apparent turn away from socialism. Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil's new president, is the latest world leader who “speaks what he thinks” and thinks a lot of things that could have sunk a politician's career in another country. He thinks Brazil’s military dictators were wimps because they jailed opponents instead of shooting them, for example. Whether he would translate the inflammatory rhetoric into actual dictatorial policy is yet to be seen.

Jacob Zuma, South Africa's president for a decade, resigned from office this year, and his replacement brought the country to international headlines for a very dubious reason. Cyril Ramaphosa wants to take land away from white farmers and redistribute it in a way that would even out the ills of colonial past. If he has his way, the white farmers won't even get compensation. It's not clear how a modern injustice would cancel out a historic injustice, but South Africa seems determined to try. The irony that this happens in the country that fought and beat apartheid is palpable.

Petro Poroshenko, the president of Ukraine, managed to trigger the biggest schism in world Orthodoxy as part of his reelection campaign. The territory of Ukraine had been under the jurisdiction of the Russian Orthodox Church for centuries. Poroshenko managed to convince Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople to challenge the status quo for the sake of creating an independent Orthodox Church in Ukraine. The Moscow patriarchy took this as basically an act of war and cut all diplomatic and spiritual ties with Constantinople in response. The head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, has also warned that Kiev's initiative that might see Orthodox religious communities diminished in Ukraine and lead to violence.

(adapted from RT.com)

A Case Study in Journalistic Malpractice

Public is lose further confidence if the a section of dishonest journalists continue to misinterpret events and falsely implicate innocent personalities...

Misreporting Manafort and the Julian Assange Affair: A Case Study in Journalistic Malpractice
By Alan MacLeod
FAIR, 3 December 2018

In what has been described as potentially the biggest story of the year, the Guardian’s Luke Harding (11/27/18) reported last week that Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, held a series of secret talks with WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange. These meetings were said to have occurred inside the Ecuadorian embassy between 2013 and 2016. The report also mentions that unspecified “Russians” were also among Assange’s visitors. The scoop, according to the newspaper, could “shed new light” on the role of WikiLeaks’ release of Democratic Party emails in the 2016 presidential election.

The story was picked up across the US, including by  USA Today(11/27/18), the Washington Post (11/27/18), Bloomberg (11/27/18), Yahoo! News (27/11/18), The Hill (11/27/18) and Rolling Stone (11/27/18). One CNN analyst (11/27/18) analyst excitedly commented that the news was “hugely significant” and “could be one of the two missing links to show real interference and knowledge of Russian involvement” in the election.

However, there were serious problems with the report. Firstly, the entire story was based upon anonymous intelligence sources, sources that could not tell the newspaper exactly when the meetings took place.

Furthermore, the Ecuadorian embassy is one of the most surveilled buildings in the most surveilled city in the world, and was under 24-hour police guard and monitoring, costing the UK government over £11 million between 2012 and 2015. The embassy also had very tight internal security, with all visitors thoroughly vetted, required to sign in and leave all their electronic devices with security. Is it really possible any figure, let alone Donald Trump’s campaign manager, could walk in for a series of secret meetings without leaving record with Ecuador, or being seen by the media or police?

For their part, both Manafort and WikiLeaks have strenuously denied the accusation, with the latter announcing, “This is going to be one of the most infamous news disasters since Stern published the Hitler Diaries.” It also declared it was planning to sue the Guardian, setting up a Go Fund Me appeal to help with legal costs.

The Guardian immediately started to walk back its claims, editing the article a number of times, changing its headline from “Manafort Held Secret Talks With Assange in Ecuadorian Embassy” to “Manafort Held Secret Talks With Assange in Ecuadorian Embassy, Sources Say.” It inserted qualifiers, denials and words like “hoax” into the text, quietly changing much of the tense of the report to the conditional. Thus, the passage “It is unclear why Manafort wanted to see Assange and what was discussed. But the last meeting is likely to come under scrutiny” was changed to (emphasis added) “It is unclear why Manafort would have wanted to see Assange and what was discussed. But the last apparent meeting is likely to come under scrutiny.” Thus a piece that started as a factual news report was transformed into an allegation—after it went viral and was picked up across international media.

The story that threatened to become the political news event of the winter was quickly dropped by the media, with search interest for terms such as “Manafort” and “Assange” dropping by around 90 percent in one day.

‘The Most Logical Explanation’

As the story crumbled, Politico (11/28/18) put forward a bizarre explanation for the event, written by an anonymous ex-CIA officer, who argued that Russian intelligence had likely planted the story as a means to discredit Harding and the Guardian, noting that, if it is all false, “the most logical explanation is that it is an attempt to make Harding look bad.” Thus, Trump, WikiLeaks and Russia’s vast “disinformation network” would be able to deride the press as purveyors of “fake news.” It appears not to have occurred to the CIA alum that the story could have been planted to discredit WikiLeaks, Russia or Manafort (and by extension, Trump).

The anonymous spy ended by stating he “finds it hard to believe Harding would not go to great lengths to confirm his story.” Russia certainly would have an interest in discrediting the Guardian and Harding, who has a long history of criticizing Putinism and was refused re-entry to the country in 2011. But the newspaper appears not to have done even basic diligence over what must have been multiple new, unknown sources by checking with the embassy or with the police, if this was indeed the case. It also ignores that one source appears to have been Ecuadorian intelligence itself, not Russian.

State officials have a long history of using a pliant media to manipulate public discourse around international struggles by introducing false information. A central part of the drive to the invasion of Iraq was the false claim that Saddam Hussein was just 45 minutes from attacking the US and UK with WMDs. Officials urged that we could not wait for the mushroom cloud and had to act now. In 2016 US officials planted a false story in the Washington Post (12/31/16) that Russia had hacked into the US electric grid. That these claims were demonstrably incorrect did not delegitimize or scupper the interests of the state, or dampen the dominant narrative. There is rarely, if ever, any price to pay for official sources lying to journalists. This was why “the most logical explanation” was certainly not that Iraqi or Russian intelligence had fed the media fake information as to discredit Western reporting. The Manafort story went viral, while the retraction of some of its claims received, in comparison, scant attention.

Harding also has an ongoing and bitter feud with Assange. (He wrote a highly critical biography of the WikiLeaks editor that was subsequently turned into the movie, The Fifth Estate, which Assange described as a “massive propaganda attack” on him.)

He also has a history of publishing deeply inflammatory claims without being able to back them up. His book, Collusion, on alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election was a New York Times No. 1 bestseller, and yet he could not give any evidence of collusion when asked in a now-infamous interview with Aaron Maté of The Real News, unable to defend even the title of his book, let alone his thesis. After being pressed harder by Maté, he simply disconnected the interview prematurely.

Therefore, Occam’s razor suggests the most logical explanation is likely that the Guardian published anonymous official sources without checking their claims’ validity.

‘Sources Say’

It is standard journalistic practice to name and check sources. Without a name to match to a quote, its credibility (and therefore that of the story) immediately drops, as there are no repercussions for that individual if they are untruthful. Sources (or journalists themselves) could simply make up anything they wanted with no consequences. Therefore, using anonymous sources is strongly discouraged, except in rare circumstances, generally when sources would face retaliation for revealing information of vital public interest. The Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics insists journalists “identify sources whenever feasible” and that journalists must “always question sources’ motives before promising anonymity.”

Unfortunately, the use of anonymous officials in reporting is increasing, and is a worrying trend in modern journalism, as the veteran reporter Robert Fisk once explained:

    I’m just looking at a copy of the Toronto Globe and Mail. It’s a story about Al Qaeda in Algeria. And what is the sourcing? “US intelligence officials said,” “a senior US intelligence official said,” “US officials said,” ‘the intelligence official said,” “Algerian officials say,” “national security sources considered,” “European security sources said”…. We might as well name our newspapers “Officials Say.” This is the cancer at the bottom of modern journalism, that we do not challenge power anymore. Why are Americans tolerating these garbage stories with no real sourcing except for very dodgy characters indeed, who won’t give their names?

In this way, anonymous state officials can influence and drive media narratives without even needed to have their name associated with a claim. However, we appear to be entering a new era where unnamed state officials not only influence, but actually write the news themselves, as demonstrated by the Politico article.

Furthermore, as FAIR (8/22/18, 9/25/18) has already cataloged, media giants such as Facebook are already working with governmental organizations like the Atlantic Council to control what we see online, under the guise of battling Russian-sponsored fake news. The Atlantic Council is a NATO offshoot whose board of directors includes neo-conservative hawks like Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Henry Kissinger and James Baker; CIA directors like Robert Gates, Leon Panetta and Michael Hayden; as well as retired generals like Wesley Clark and David Petraeus.

Leave alone that much of the most sensational reporting and claims about Russian influence comes from the Atlantic Council’s reports in the first place, thus creating a perfect feedback loop justifying more active measures. Therefore, much of the coverage of Russian state propaganda is itself state propaganda!

The Utility of Misreporting

Why was a highly questionable report from a foreign media outlet based upon anonymous sources picked up far and wide, sometimes without even a basic follow-up, such as asking for comment from the Ecuadorian embassy, Assange or Manafort (again, standard journalistic practice)?

As I argued previously (FAIR.org, 7/27/18), there is great utility for the establishment in promoting the idea of foreign interference in American domestic issues. For one, it helps develop a conspiratorial mindset among the public, encouraging them to be less critical of the state when the United States is “under attack.” Liberals’ trust in the FBI has markedly increased since Trump’s election and the focus on Russia.

Kremlin-sponsored “fake news” also serves as a pretext for mainstream media monopolies to re-tighten their grip over the means of communication. Media giants such as Google, Facebook, Bingand YouTube have changed their algorithms, supposedly to fight fake news. However, the consequence has been to strangle alternative media that challenged the mainstream narrative. Since Google changed its algorithm, WikiLeaks’ search traffic dropped 30 per cent, AlterNet by 63 per cent, Democracy Now! 36 per cent and Common Dreams by 37 per cent.

Finally, for the political establishment, the Russian fake news story gives them a convenient excuse as to why Trump was able to win the Republican nomination and defeat Hillary Clinton and to why new movements, from the alt-right to Black Lives Matter and the Bernie Sanders phenomenon on the left, have occurred. They are not responses to the decay of the political and economic system, but examples of foreign interference.

Adam Johnson’s “North Korea Law of Journalism” states that journalistic standards “are inversely proportional to a country’s enemy status,” meaning that the more antagonistic the US is to a country, the more lackadaisical journalists can be with the truth while reporting on said state. FAIR has consistently cataloged misreporting of enemy states, such as Iran (9/9/15; 7/25/17) North Korea (5/9/17; 3/22/17) Venezuela ( 5/16/17; 3/2/07), Cuba or Syria (10/21/15), where their supposed threat to the world or their human rights violations are ramped up, while downplaying crimes of friendly states (2/1/09).

The same can equally be said of enemy political figures like Assange, Sanders or Jill Stein. When it serves a political function, stories about official enemies too good to be true are also too good not to publish.

The Secret Airline That Flies to Area 51

Unmarked airplane without any flight number...

A Secret Airline Flies Nonstop to Area 51 Every Day
May 9, 2018
by Joanie Faletto

If you're anywhere near Area 51, you shouldn't be peering into the sky searching for UFOs. Nah, don't waste your time with that hullabaloo. Instead, look for a flying object you might actually have a good chance at spotting: a Janet jet. Let us introduce you to the airline that flies nonstop to the shadowy compound every single day.
 
Area 51, more formally known as "Detachment 3, Air Force Flight Test Center," is a highly classified government location in southern Nevada that, according to files released by the FBI, dates back to 1955. The reason you're familiar with it is that many say that after a UFO crashed nearby in Roswell, New Mexico, it was the secret site of alien research (and maybe still is). That wild theory aside, the U.S. government acknowledged it's a real place in 2013 — although not as a facility for E.T. testing, but as a facility for the government's spy-plane program.

Janet jet airline nonstop to the shadowy compound every single day.

Multiple times a day, a small fleet of 737s fly in and out of a restricted terminal (the "Gold Coast") of the McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas. These planes, which only display a registration number and a single red stripe on a white fuselage, are known as "Janet" jets. The airline isn't named "Janet," nor are the planes actually called "Janet." Rather, some aviation nerds once put the pieces together that "Janet" is the callsign given to these jets when they're flying in civilian airspace. Once Janet enters special use airspace, however, the jets change frequencies and get entirely different names. This is, as Jalopnik describes, the "most restricted airspace on Earth," after all.

There are six Janet jets that you can see taking off and landing in McCarran's "Gold Coast" terminal (it's situated right next to some parking lots), but you'll likely never be in one. The planes set off for many of the sites inside the secretive Nellis Air Force Range, which includes the Nevada National Security Site, previously known as the Nevada Test Site. Smack-dab in the middle of that patch of land is Area 51. It's here that the U.S. has tested more than 900 nuclear weapons (you can see craters in photos as evidence). Also within this area are a slew of government facilities in some way related to testing secret advanced aircraft and providing air combat training.

E.T. Need Not Apply

And that's about as much as anyone can really know. If you're an aviation enthusiast looking for work, however, maybe you could get aboard one of these mysterious jets one day. In January 2018, there was a job posting for a flight attendant aboard a Janet jet. How could you not be intrigued with requirements like this?: "must be level-headed and clear thinking while handling unusual incidents and situations (severe weather conditions, including turbulence, delays due to weather or mechanicals, hijackings or bomb threats)." There's just one more important prereq for the job: "Active Top Secret Clearance Highly Desired."

Ten Commandments of War Propaganda

1.     We do not want war.
2.     The opposite party alone is guilty of war.
3.     The enemy is the face of the devil.
4.     We defend a noble cause, not our own interest.
5.     The enemy systematically commits cruelties; our mishaps are involuntary.
6.     The enemy uses forbidden weapons.
7.     We suffer small losses, those of the enemy are enormous.
8.     Artists and intellectuals back our cause.
9.     Our cause is sacred.
10.     All who doubt our propaganda, are traitors.

«Falsehood in War-time, Containing an Assortment of Lies Circulated Throughout the Nations During the Great War»

Written by Arthur, Ponsonby in 1928

A fake German Der Spiegel journalist exposed...

All the Der Spiegel journalists lie all of the time -- this is just a propaganda piece to make the public think that plucky honesty keeps "our" press freedom. Of course, all Western journalists lie all of the time because they're mostly spooks or run by spooks.

Either the journalists are spooks or they report to spooky bosses. All of Western media is now controlled by the intelligence agencies. Research Operation Mockingbird and the "Mighty Wurlitzer". It never ended.

You fake, you get awards. That is the MSM.

Journalists are only human. Humans lie for advantage or to cover up and misdirect from the truth. We see it and hear it everyday. Journalists seem to be the worst, simply because they have the audience. Politicians are the worst, because they are owned and say what they are told to say, and do what they are told to do. There are exceptions, but they are few and far between.

Unfortunately the damage is done by the time the truth surfaces. And that is what propaganda is meant to do.

They don't just fabricate, they plant. They plant "narratives" for the likes of the CIA.

If Journalists would do what they are supposedt to do the world would be a better place. No one is more to blame on wars than the media itself.

Journalists also toed the line of their masters on WMD in Iraq.

And said that David Kelly just committed suicide at a convenient time just before he was going to announce the findings of his report.  Journos support the globalist agenda and of course worship the UN officials.

This story has antecedents in Germany. Udo Ulfkotte former editor of the Frankfurter Allgemaine Zeitung claims that for years he years he published articles and op-eds under his own name that were written and sent to him by the CIA. He also claimed that EVERY major newspaper in Europe has CIA agents on their staff. Then we have Judith Miller in the NYT. Keep in mind that her partner in crime, one Michael Gordon, still works for the NYT.

He said what they wanted to hear. Therefore the awards. It isn't a new low in journalism, it's just a low in world events and those who would steer us in the direction they want. We live in a post-truth world.

It's just a small tip of the iceberg compared to all the fabricated lies from the MSMs.

Once 'Der Spiegel' was a reputable or popular magazine, past tense, their circulation number are in free fall for years. Today they are degraded to a Fake-News and Propaganda outfit, like all the MSM, print + broadcast, in Germany they are infiltrated by parasitic shills+foreign agents of 'The Atlantic Bridge' 'Aspen Institute' + 'Atlantic Council'. The MSM + private broadcaster are owned+controlled by corrupt, rotten+treacherous elites, the public broadcaster are controlled by the corrupt political establishment.

The same everywhere. The Guardian here broke the wikileaks story, and was swiftly taken over by the CIA. Then the Indy was the only occasionally honest news outlet in the UK, but it was bought by the saudis, and from then on took their orders from the KSA tyranny.But those doing this have simply undermined all trust in all western media, hence the rapidly increasing popularity of RT.

Fabricating is what amateurs do. The pros get bought-and-paid-off by the CIA etc. Read the revelations of the late Udo Ulfkotte who, after their publication, met his early demise "of natural causes" (of course) at 55.

Fraud ‘on grand scale’: Top journalist at reputable German magazine faked his stories for YEARS
RT : 19 Dec, 2018

One of Germany’s most popular papers, Der Spiegel, has found itself at the center of a scandal involving one of its top reporters who was caught fabricating elements of his stories.

Claas Relotius, who worked at Der Spiegel as a freelancer for 6 years until receiving a staff position in 2017, seemed to be a paragon of modern journalism. The 33-year-old has received numerous prestigious journalism awards, both in Germany and abroad.

Just this December he was awarded a prize by the German reporter’s association for his story about the life of a child in Syria. In 2014, Relotius was warmly welcomed by CNN who named him ‘Journalist of the Year.’

However, his seemingly brilliant career has turned out to be a house of cards that is now falling apart, just as it had with Stephen Glass, a former staff writer at the New Republic who authored one of the most spectacular fabrication campaigns in the history of American journalism.

It was recently revealed that Relotius literally made up details in his stories and even “invented protagonists” – people he had never met in person.

One of his colleagues who was working with Relotius on a story about the situation on the US-Mexican border grew suspicious of some of the details in the journalist’s report. The man then tracked down two alleged sources Relotius quoted extensively in his text, only to find out that none of them ever actually met him.

The subsequent investigation by Der Spiegel into Relotius’ activities also uncovered that he fabricated details in another story including a claim that he had seen a sign in a US town that read: “Mexicans keep out.” When faced with the incriminating evidence, the journalist confessed to faking elements of his texts – not just in one story, but in a number of them.

So far, at least 14 stories out of almost 60 pieces the journalist wrote for Der Spiegel’s print and online editions turned out to contain fake details, the magazine said, adding that that figure might potentially be higher, and warning that other media outlets might also be affected.

Over the years, Relotius worked for about a dozen German news outlets, including the well-known Die Welt, Die Zeit and Financial Times Germany. Notably, the list of his stories that were proven to be at least partially fake included several pieces that had won journalism awards, including stories about Iraqi children kidnapped by Islamic State and prisoners in Guantanamo.

In a lengthy article which serves as both a clarification of the case and an apology, Der Spiegel said it was “shocked” by the discovery and offered an apology to its readers along with all those affected by Relotius’ articles. It also described the situation as "a low point in Der Spiegel's 70-year history."

Relotius, who resigned after the fraud came to light, told Der Spiegel that he regretted his actions and felt “deeply ashamed.” Meanwhile, the magazine’s management has set up a special investigative commission consisting of what it calls “experienced internal and external persons” to look through all of the journalist’s pieces and prepare recommendations to improve “safety mechanisms.”

Rise and fall of smart luggage startup Raden

The best of everything

    The absurd quest to make the “best” razor
    The rise of the recommendation site
    11 senior citizens on the best products of the past century
    The best doesn’t exist. A psychologist explains why we can’t stop searching.
    The “best” lipstick probably won’t change your life — but the search for it can
    Online reviews will never help you find the “best” product. That doesn’t mean they aren’t useful.
    I used all the best stuff for a week and it nearly broke


When the “best” busts: the spectacular rise and fall of smart luggage startup Raden
How a company goes from totally sold-out to totally shuttered in just two years.
By Chavie Lieber
Vox, Dec 12, 2018

The Goods

Part of The best of everything

Allbirds, according to Allbirds, makes “the world’s most comfortable shoes.” Thirdlove, according to Thirdlove, makes “the best-fitting bras.” Brooklinen says they “do sheets best.” Ritual vitamins contain “nutrients in their best forms,” and buying a Quip toothbrush will get you “the best experience at the best price.”

The direct-to-consumer landscape is expansive, but no matter the product category, a startup’s promise is almost always the same. These companies claim to sell you the very best thing while disrupting the status quo, whether it’s Warby Parker upsetting the $140 billion eyewear industry by selling glasses online without the retail markup or Casper’s mattress-in-a-box making industry giants stumble.

Most of these startups follow a similar playbook. Enter a sleepy or uncrowded market, develop a product with millennial-friendly branding, and then raise millions of dollars in funding from venture capital firms. The money that’s handed over is often spent in a dizzying whirlwind: on merchandise, marketing, talent, ads, events, collabs — all with the goal of seeing exponential sales growth in the shortest time possible.

Three years ago, Josh Udashkin decided that the luggage industry was yet another market ripe for disruption. Luggage accounted for $30 billion in annual global sales at the time, yet was pretty underwhelming as a product category. There were a few luxury brands in the space, like Rimowa and Tumi, but nothing more affordably priced that also had memorable design and branding that could appeal to millennials, a demo that loves to travel and is willing to shell out for their wanderlust. If Casper could build brand affinity in the unsexy mattress space, couldn’t Udashkin do it with luggage?

At the time, the now-35-year-old Udashkin was traveling frequently as a lawyer for the footwear company Aldo. Dismayed with his luggage options, he wanted to make the best suitcase, in terms of not just style and price but also tech. He named his company Raden and in 2016 introduced a sleek polycarbonate bag with four-wheel spinners and an ergonomic handle, which could act as a scale to determine the bag’s weight.

The real star of the show, though, was the bag’s built-in lithium battery. It could charge gadgets and had GPS radios and 3G connectivity built into it too, so when suitcase owners connected their bag to the Raden app, it could be tracked. The app would send push notifications to relay flight information and when the suitcase arrived on the luggage carousel. Udashkin priced his bags at $295 for a small carry-on and $395 for a large one; they came in several colors, including pink.

Within six months, Raden earned a spot on Oprah’s annual Favorite Things holiday shopping list. “They practically come with a college degree,” Oprah enthused. “Smartest luggage ever.” By Christmas, Raden’s inventory of 19,000 suitcases had completely sold out, and there was a 7,000-person waitlist. Retailers from all over the world were phoning Udashkin, eager to stock the bags. The founder calculated that at this rate, Raden would be on track to hit $10 million in sales by year two.

Udashkin calls the 2016 holiday season, with all its Oprah madness, “a life highlight”; he describes 2017 as “a terrible year.” Over the course of a few months, Raden went from a company that was thriving to one that was barely surviving. In May 2018, Raden completely shuttered, leaving customers bewildered: How did such a promising startup, one that wanted to make the best suitcase, boom and bust in no time at all?

Like many Silicon Valley startup founders, Udashkin was young, male, and white and had access to a network that was willing and able to back Raden. He secured an initial $500,000 between his own savings and investments from family and friends.

That money went toward hiring supply chain experts from Samsonite and Tumi to consult on how to manufacture luggage and a product designer from Beats by Dre to build the “smart” component of his suitcase. This tech offering was what Udashkin believed would set up Raden for instant success. He wanted his luggage to be more than just a bag; he wanted to it to be a covetable gadget that would make traveling easier.

After a prototype was built and the production logistics were figured out, Udashkin realized he needed a lot more money to get the company off the ground. The most natural option would be to raise a seed round of funding led by a venture capital firm, but he was hesitant.

VCs invest with the expectation that they’ll get rich off an IPO or an acquisition from a Walmart or a Unilever, and they’re willing to infuse small companies with huge amounts of cash to make that happen. Casper has raised $239.7 million and Warby Parker $290.5 million; both companies have been on IPO watch for a while now. Then there’s Rent the Runway with $416.2 million and Harry’s with $474.6 million. Jessica Alba’s Honest Company tops them all, with $503 million in funding.

“The position of investors funding these consumer brands is that they don’t mind spending money to develop a product faster, steal talent, hire more people, and kill off competition,” says Alex Wilhelm, the editor in chief of Crunchbase, which tracks investment rounds.

This is the exact opposite approach Udashkin wanted.

“I have friends who are VCs, and I know that the money isn’t free — it has an outsize return,” he says. “You have to give them a return of 10 times, and I didn’t want to run on an endless treadmill. The way I saw it, Tumi spent 40 years getting to $100 million in sales. I wanted to be a $100 million business, sure, but I didn’t think I had to do it in two years.”

Still, he needed capital to bring his product to market.

“I don’t think I understood the type of money that was going into this world,” he says. In August 2015, he raised $3 million from Lerer Hippeau Ventures (which has invested in Allbirds, Casper, and Everlane) as well as First Round Capital (Uber, Rover, Warby Parker). Investors were taken by Udashkin’s enthusiasm and charisma. Ben Lerer, a managing partner at Lerer Hippeau, wrote on his company blog that the founder was “the right kind of lunatic” with a “brand-building mentality.” He declared that Raden would “change the way people travel.”

When Raden launched its website and simultaneously began selling on Amazon the following March, the company was lavished with press attention. A Soho pop-up that opened a month later earned the startup a profile in the New York Times, which Udashkin says helped him secure wholesale partnerships with Farfetch, Selfridges, and Nordstrom. Raden suitcases were put on tons of best luggage roundups. Things were going so well that after the company was notified it had been selected for Oprah’s Favorite Things, Udashkin raised another $2 million from investors, to keep up with the company’s growth.

But trouble came for Raden shortly after the Oprah bump. Raden was cash-rich and inventory-poor, so much of the new VC money was spent fulfilling orders on the waitlist. The rest went to overhead: salaries for 15 employees, office space, retail rent, website maintenance. By the early months of 2017, the business was operating on a shoestring budget; Udashkin admitted “there was sometimes $0 in the bank.” Investors counseled him to raise more money, but he believed he could keep the company running from the revenue Raden was earning from sales.

But Raden wasn’t the only game in town. It launched around the same time as another smart luggage brand, Away. Direct-to-consumer brands often launch in clusters; take the slew of mattress companies — Leesa, Tuft & Needle, Purple, Allswell — that entered the market around the same time as Casper.

In addition to Away, there was Bluesmart, which began selling smart luggage after crowdfunding its product in 2014 on Indiegogo. But Bluesmart, with bags twice the price as Raden’s, was seen as making luxury luggage “for a business executive with an expense account,” according to The Verge, and was never quite considered a direct Raden competitor. Away was a different story. The companies’ bags were priced similarly and the designs were close too, with their hard-shell covers, four-spinner wheels, and plethora of color options. (Away also had a millennial pink bag, of course).

Still, Udashkin didn’t felt threatened by competition; there are plenty of people who need suitcases, after all. Then in May 2017, Away raised $20 million in funding. The round included the venture capital firms Global Founders Capital, Comcast Ventures, Accel Partners, and Forerunner Ventures, which count companies like Facebook, Slack, LinkedIn, Eventbrite, and Jet.com in their portfolios.

With this kind of cash, Away planned to get bigger fast by expanding beyond a single carry-on bag into other product offerings and by opening permanent brick-and-mortar retail stores. It also set its sights on becoming a lifestyle brand by way of a magazine and podcast. Eurie Kim, a partner at Forerunner Ventures, says she was attracted to Away because of its founders’ multifaceted aspirations for their luggage company.

“The Away brand has always been about a broader vision for modern travel,” says Kim, “so even in product development, they didn’t focus exclusively on the tech aspects of the product, but rather the spirit of the wanderlust-driven community.”

Suddenly, Away was everywhere, online and off. In New York, there were Away billboards; in Chicago, ads at the airport. You couldn’t scroll through Instagram or Facebook without seeing promoted posts about the brand.

“Raden had never been on a billboard or bus ad, and had gotten to where we were by being quite frugal,” Udashkin says. “It felt like we were getting killed.”

At that point, he realized Raden needed to start advertising — and would need to raise money to do so. When he started his search for new investors, he found the tide had turned.

“People had questions about why we weren’t seeing crazy month-to-month growth, and they felt that even though we were selling bags, we weren’t ‘acquiring customers,’” he says. “I actually thought we were making an enormous amount of money.” While Udashkin declined to share sales figures, he says the company was not yet profitable.

This skeptical investor response isn’t surprising to Wilhelm. “If you’re in a space with VC competitors and you don’t have enough VC money, you have to be 10 times better or you will die,” he says. “It’s a meritocracy, where capital is the advantage rather than the product.”

Udashkin eventually landed a verbal commitment from a private equity firm, which promised a check if results during the holiday 2017 season were satisfactory. But Raden had disappointing holiday sales. Maybe it was because smart luggage was no longer a novelty, or potential customers were flocking to Away instead.

Then came the smart luggage ban on airplanes. Lithium batteries, like the ones that powered Raden luggage, were starting fires on planes, and in December 2017, the Federal Aviation Administration announced passengers couldn’t fly with smart luggage whose batteries weren’t removable. (A couple of years earlier, major airlines also banned hoverboards out of concern their batteries were a fire hazard.)

“Once I saw the airline announcement, I knew fundraising was over,” Udashkin says. “There was no one who would invest in this business with this risk.”

It wasn’t that the FAA rule made Raden luggage unusable. The company’s batteries were indeed removable, but they were located inside a zip pouch on the inside of each bag, so customers would have to unpack their suitcase to remove the battery before boarding a flight. The company have a prototype with a more easily accessible removable battery in the works. But without funding to lean on, development couldn’t be accelerated, and issuing refunds or replacing old models with new ones was out of the question.

“We branded ourselves as a smart bag,” Udashkin says, “and once you can’t have a battery, the entire value proposition and product development investment is killed.”

In the end, a perfect storm of fierce competition, too little funding, and government regulations killed Raden. Udashkin thought about selling the company but decided to shut it down entirely this past May, just two weeks after Bluesmart announced that it too was going out of business.

Raden’s website now features nothing but a somber goodbye note; its Instagram is frozen in time. Bloomingdale’s and Need Supply are running through their remaining inventory by offering steep discounts; used Raden suitcases are available for sale on Amazon and eBay.

Away, on the other hand, has thrived. After the FAA announcement, the company emailed customers with instructions on how to remove its batteries from the luggage with a screwdriver, and posted related videos to its website. It redesigned its bags to feature batteries that easily pop out on the exterior, and allowed customers to swap out their old models for free. In June, one month after Raden folded, Away announced it had raised another $50 million in funding.

Hindsight for Udashkin is, of course, 20/20. Looking back, he knows he should have raised more money and put forth a wider brand vision for Raden.

“I guess I was really caught up in the business, and I was honestly happy with where I was,” he says. “When you’re in it, you feel like you need to push through and ignore feedback you don’t feel to be true.”

Raden’s investors likely aren’t too devastated; this kind of crash and burn happens all the time.

“There’s going to be a high rate of failure, and while no one likes to lose money, the whole point is to be in it for the risk,” says Edward Lando, an angel investor who made a small investment in Raden after meeting Udashkin at a conference. “When I write a check, I kiss the money goodbye. The downside is that you lose the original investment, but the upside is that you can earn 100 times more.” Lerer Hippeau and First Round both declined to comment.

Raden may be a blip in the greater history of startup failure, but the experience was traumatic for Udashkin, and one that he’s still working through in therapy. Having to tell investors, family, friends, and staff the company had failed was brutal. “I didn’t get out of bed for two months,” he says. “I thought no one would ever want to speak to me again.”

A few months after Raden shuttered for good, Udashkin started consulting for LVMH. He doesn’t plan to start a new company anytime soon. Every now and then, though, he’ll get a call from a VC eager to hear if he’s got anything cooking. They couldn’t get rich from him the first time, but there’s always round two.

Australian Professor Suspended for Criticism of War Propaganda

A prominent Australian university professor was suspended from his academic position for criticising vicious Israeli attacks on Gaza. His dissenting views had drawn the ire of US-UK-NATO-Zionist imperialist bootlicking Australian govt officials. He wrote a carefully documented book to expose the bogus war on terrrorism and the West's illegal dirty war in Syria. Dissenting voices are subtly suppressed and harassed in so-called civilised countries like Australia.
= = =

University of Sydney Professor Tim Anderson Suspended for “Criticism of War Propaganda against Syria, Iraq and Palestine”
By Prof. Tim Anderson and Jordan Baker
Global Research, December 08, 2018

Global Research is in solidarity with Professor Tim Anderson who was suspended from his position as Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney, Australia.

This decision by the University’s Provost was largely motivated by Professor Anderson’s research and public statements on Syria, Iraq and Palestine including Anderson’s carefully documented book entitled The Dirty War on Syria, “Through careful analysis, professor Anderson reveals the “unspoken truth”: the “war on terrorism” is fake, the United States is a “State sponsor of terrorism” involved in a criminal undertaking.

Scroll down for reviews of Prof. Anderson’s book on Syria (published by Global Research). (click book cover right to order Tim Anderson’s international bestseller)

It should be understood that this is not an isolated event. Academic freedom is threatened. Several prominent academics have been fired or intimidated under different circumstances.

Below is Tim Anderson’s text on his Facebook page  followed by an article published by the Sydney Morning Herald.

"Yesterday University of Sydney Provost Stephen Garton suspended me from my position as a senior lecturer and banned me from entering the university. I have worked as an academic at this University for more than 20 years and am appealing the decision to a Review Committee.

This move is the culmination of a series of failed attempts by management to restrict my public comments. I have always rejected such censorship. The latest complaint concerns my advisory analysis of the Israeli attacks on Gaza. Examine the graphic below and decide for yourself whether or how this infographic might be ‘offensive’.

These complaints, over the last 18 months, have been petty and absurd. In my view they represent an unusually aggressive regime of political censorship, in which no decent university should be involved.

Most of the management complaints have to do with my criticisms of war propaganda against Syria, Iraq and Palestine. I don’t accept such censorship.

Stephen Garton has ignored the ‘intellectual freedom’ rule of the university, which states that academic staff are entitled to ‘express unpopular or controversial views, provided that in doing so staff must not engage in harassment, vilification or intimidation’. I will point this out to the Review Committee.

I have told Provost Garton that I don’t abuse or engage in gratuitous criticism, but I do criticise dishonest propaganda harshly, when justified. I have rejected his attempts at political censorship as unprincipled."
= = =
Academics fight suspension of lecturer over swastika image
by Jordan Baker,
Sydney Morning Herald, December 7,  2018

Sydney University academics have criticised the suspension of an academic who showed students material featuring the Nazi swastika imposed over Israel’s flag, saying it was a body blow to academic freedom. (see above image, left hand corner)

By Friday afternoon 30 academics, including several emeritus professors, had signed the open letter arguing that academic freedom was “meaningless if it is suspended when its exercise is deemed offensive.”

The academic at the centre of the controversy, senior lecturer in political economy Tim Anderson, has also been criticised by federal ministers for visiting Syria and North Korea, where he expressed solidarity with their dictatorial regimes.

Earlier this week, Sydney University served Dr Anderson a termination notice, saying the swastika material amounted to serious misconduct that was “disrespectful and offensive, and contrary to the university’s behavioural expectations”.

Dr Anderson was given a week to show why he should not be sacked and has been barred from entering the university in the meantime. He is appealing the decision, describing the complaints as petty and absurd.

The academics, mostly from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, said employment should not be dependent on their work remaining within the bounds of “contested and intrinsically indefinable constraint”.

Some of the signatories of the letter are also vocal opponents of a proposal by the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation to fund a course in western tradition at the university. They argue that the proposal also compromises academic freedom.

    “The suspension of Dr Tim Anderson pending the termination of his employment is an unacceptable act of censorship and a body-blow to academic freedom at the University of Sydney,” the academics wrote in the open letter.

Australian Academics Witch-hunted for Challenging US Lies on Syria Attack

    “There can be no better-known or more banal occurrence in intellectual history than the suppression of ideas on the grounds of their offensiveness to powerful interests.”

    *
The Dirty War on Syria has relied on a level of mass disinformation not seen in living memory. In seeking ‘regime change’ the big powers sought to hide their hand, using proxy armies of ‘Islamists’, demonising the Syrian Government and constantly accusing it of atrocities. In this way Syrian President Bashar al Assad, a mild-mannered eye doctor, became the new evil in the world.

The popular myths of this dirty war – that it is a ‘civil war’, a ‘popular revolt’ or a sectarian conflict – hide a murderous spree of ‘regime change’ across the region. The attack on Syria was a necessary consequence of Washington’s ambition, stated openly in 2006, to create a ‘New Middle East’. After the destruction of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, Syria was next in line.

= = =
Australian Academics Witch-hunted for Challenging US Lies on Syria Attack
By Mike Head
Global Research, April 16, 2017
World Socialist Web Site 14 April 2017

Amid a media barrage to try to drum up public support for US-led military attacks on Syria and North Korea, the corporate media and the Turnbull government have launched an extraordinary vilification campaign against academics seeking to expose the lies behind last week’s US cruise missile strike on Syria.

The witch-hunt is an open attack on basic democratic rights, above all free speech—accompanied by demands that the University of Sydney censor, discipline or sack staff members for even calling into question the pretext for the illegal attack ordered by US President Donald Trump.

Clearly, there are deep fears in ruling circles about the publication of any information or criticism that lays bare the false justification for the US aggression and points to the record of similar fabrications concocted by the US and its allies, including Australia, to justify their endless predatory wars in the Middle East.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s government has been one of the most vociferous global defenders of the US attack. Turnbull declared there was no doubt that “the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad committed a shocking war crime against the people of Syria, with a chemical attack … that called out for a swift response.”

For decades, Australian governments have endorsed every such lie perpetrated by Washington, including the “weapons of mass destruction” fraud used to invade Iraq in 2003.

The initial target of the political witch-hunt has been University of Sydney economics and international politics lecturer Dr Tim Anderson and other academics associated with his online Centre for Counter Hegemonic Studies. After the missile attack, Anderson posted social media comments pointing out there was no independent evidence, or plausible motive, to accuse the Syrian government of conducting the alleged April 4 sarin gas attack that killed 87 people in the town of Khan Sheikhoun.

Anderson suggested that the gassing was more likely to be another “false flag” atrocity committed by US-backed, Al Qaeda-linked outfits. They have previously made similar attempts to trigger US intervention to oust Assad, such as the 2013 Ghouta chemical weapons attack that was later systematically exposed by veteran American journalist Seymour Hersh.

Significantly, the government-funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) spearheaded the demonisation of the academics. Its “Media Watch” television program last Monday accused Anderson of spreading “disinformation and discord.”

Backed by denunciations of Anderson issued by ABC and Guardian journalists, the program sought to discredit him by making an amalgam between his postings and others by extreme right-wing sites and mouthpieces for the Sryian and Russian governments.

Rupert Murdoch’s media outlets, such as the Sydney Daily Telegraph, blazoned the accusations against Anderson over their front pages, under headlines depicting him as an “Assad-loving boffin” and his associates as “uni loonies.” The Australian, Murdoch’s national broadsheet, attacked the University of Sydney for refusing to act against them.

Turnbull’s Education Minister Simon Birmingham, who is responsible for university funding, told the Daily Telegraph the university should investigate Anderson’s comments.

    “Although universities are places where ideas should be contested, that’s no excuse for being an apologist [for the Assad regime],” he insisted.

The clear logic of this declaration is that anyone who questions any aspect of US or Australian foreign and military policy is guilty of supporting war crimes and should therefore be sacked, or even prosecuted under war crimes or anti-terrorism legislation.

Fairfax Media extended the offensive to the University of Sydney itself. “One of Australia’s most prestigious universities” was at the centre of a “pro-Assad push,” the Sydney Morning Herald’s Michael Koziol declared.

There are signs that the barrage may backfire. The ABC’s smears provoked outrage among its viewers. One typical comment posted on “Media Watch’s” web site denounced the program for emulating other media “megaphones” in producing “not one shred of evidence to back the claim that this event was perpetrated” by Syria.

Another viewer warned:

    “What is interesting about this sordid witch-hunt is that it accuses all who dare disagree with obvious lies of being stooges of Assad and Putin. The accusation of ‘treachery’ and ‘treason’ will not long be delayed.”

In his own response to “Media Watch,” Anderson rejected its allegation that he was “misleading public understanding.” As an academic, he said,

    “I have a responsibility to educate the public, especially in face of the constant misinformation from Australia’s corporate and state media.”

The WSWS has fundamental political differences with Anderson, a longtime supporter of bourgeois nationalist regimes such as Assad’s. Nevertheless, we unconditionally defend his right, and the right of all academics, political activists, workers and students, to oppose the drive to war and to exercise freedom of political expression.

Anderson told the WSWS the corporate and state media “feel the imperative to back a new war drive against Syria” and wanted to “shout down any dissenting voices on this dirty war.” He said the “fake news” operation “does frighten some people, but we have also received a great deal of public support in the past few days.”

Independent federal parliamentarian Andrew Wilkie this week also questioned the US charges against Assad. In 2003, Wilkie resigned from the Office of National Assessments, a top-level intelligence agency, in an attempt to expose the “weapons of mass destruction” and other lies being used to justify the US-led invasion of Iraq and Australia’s involvement in it.

    “Frankly I don’t trust the Trump administration,” Wilkie told reporters. “From first principles it just seems so unlikely that President Assad would have used sarin gas on his own people at this particular time, for a whole range of reasons.” It was “a very unlikely choice of weapon when you know it’s going to attract such a strong military response from the United States.”

Speaking from an Australian nationalist standpoint, Wilkie said:

    “It’s regrettable that here we are again just instantly agreeing with whatever the Americans are saying, instead of taking an opportunity to be a little more independent … We have been stuck in the Middle East quagmire since 2003, again on account of allegations of chemical and biological and nuclear weapons.”

In reality, rather than being duped, successive Australian governments have willingly joined one “false flag” US-led war after another in order to secure Washington’s backing for Australian imperialism’s own mercenary operations in the Asia-Pacific.

The witch-hunt against the academics is part of a broader attempt to suppress anti-war sentiment. Last week, the Turnbull government revoked the visa of a prominent Palestinian activist, Bassem Tamimi, to prevent him from addressing public meetings in Australia.

The bid to silence public discussion is a warning. More than 15 years after the declaration of the “war on terror,” the unending war drive by US imperialism is entering a potentially catastrophic stage. Having already devastated much of the Middle East, Washington and its partners are planning even more aggressive actions, posing the danger of direct military conflicts with nuclear-armed Russia and China.

The building of a global anti-war movement of the working class, armed with a socialist perspective, is the only way to prevent a disastrous conflagration.

The Dirty War on Syria has relied on a level of mass disinformation not seen in living memory. In seeking ‘regime change’ the big powers sought to hide their hand, using proxy armies of ‘Islamists’, demonising the Syrian Government and constantly accusing it of atrocities. In this way Syrian President Bashar al Assad, a mild-mannered eye doctor, became the new evil in the world.

The popular myths of this dirty war – that it is a ‘civil war’, a ‘popular revolt’ or a sectarian conflict – hide a murderous spree of ‘regime change’ across the region. The attack on Syria was a necessary consequence of Washington’s ambition, stated openly in 2006, to create a ‘New Middle East’. After the destruction of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, Syria was next in line.

Five years into this war the evidence is quite clear and must be set out in detail. The terrible massacres were mostly committed by the western backed jihadists, then blamed on the Syrian Army. The western media and many western NGOs parroted the official line. Their sources were almost invariably those allied to the ‘jihadists’. Contrary to the myth that the big powers now have their own ‘war on terror’, those same powers have backed every single anti-government armed group in Syria, ‘terrorists’ in any other context, adding thousands of ‘jihadis’ from dozens of countries.

Yet in Syria this dirty war has confronted a disciplined national army which did not disintegrate along sectarian lines. Despite terrible destruction and loss of life, Syria has survived, deepening its alliance with Russia, Iran, the Lebanese Resistance, the secular Palestinians and, more recently, with Iraq. The tide has turned against Washington, and that will have implications beyond Syria.

As western peoples we have been particularly deceived by this dirty war, reverting to our worst traditions of intervention, racial prejudice and poor reflection on our own histories. This book tries to tell its story while rescuing some of the better western traditions: the use of reason, ethical principle and the search for independent evidence.

Reviews:

Tim Anderson  has written the best systematic critique of western fabrications justifying the war against the Assad government.

No other text brings together all the major accusations and their effective refutation.

This text is essential reading for all peace and justice activists.  -James Petras, Author and Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York, Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Tim Anderson’s important new book, titled “The Dirty War on Syria” discusses US naked aggression – “rely(ing) on a level of mass disinformation not seen in living memory,” he explains.

ISIS is the pretext for endless war without mercy, Assad the target, regime change the objective, wanting pro-Western puppet governance replacing Syrian sovereign independence.

There’s nothing civil about war in Syria, raped by US imperialism, partnered with rogue allies. Anderson’s book is essential reading to understand what’s going on. –Stephen Lendman, Distinguished Author and Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Host of the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

Professor Anderson demonstrates unequivocally through carefully documented research that America’s “Moderate Opposition” are bona fide Al Qaeda affiliated terrorists created and protected by the US and its allies, recruited  and trained by Saudi Arabia, Turkey, in liaison with Washington and Brussels.

Through careful analysis, professor Anderson reveals the “unspoken truth”: the “war on terrorism” is fake, the United States is a “State sponsor of terrorism” involved in a criminal undertaking. Michel Chossudovsky, Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization, Professor of Economics (Emeritus), University of Ottawa.

Anderson’s excellent book is required reading for those wanting to know the true story of the imperialist proxy war waged on Syria by the U.S. and its Western and Middle Eastern puppet states. This account could also be titled “How to Destroy a Country and Lie About it”. Of course Syria is only one in a long line of countries destroyed by Washington in the Middle East and all over the Global South for more than a century.

Anderson’s analysis is particularly useful for dissecting the propaganda war waged by the U.S. to hide its active support for the vicious Islamic fundamentalists it is using in Syria. In spreading this propaganda the U.S. has been aided not only by the West’s mainstream press but also by its prominent so-called human rights organizations. Asad Ismi, International Affairs Correspondent for The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives Monitor.

Signs You're Not Getting Enough Protein

Signs You're Not Getting Enough Protein

Swelling

One of the most common signs that you're not getting enough protein is swelling (also called edema), especially in your abdomen, legs, feet, and hands. A possible explanation: The proteins that circulate in your blood -- albumin, in particular -- help keep fluid from building up in your tissues. But many things can cause edema, so be sure to check with your doctor in case it's more serious.

Mood Changes

Your brain uses chemicals called neurotransmitters to relay information between cells. Many of these neurotransmitters are made of amino acids, which are the building blocks of protein. So a lack of protein in your diet could mean your body can't make enough of those neurotransmitters, and that would change how your brain works. With low levels of dopamine and serotonin, for example, you may feel depressed or overly aggressive.

Hair, Nail, and Skin Problems

These are made up of proteins like elastin, collagen, and keratin. When your body can't make them, you could have brittle or thinning hair, dry and flaky skin, and deep ridges on your fingernails. Your diet isn't the only possible cause, of course, but it's something to consider.

Weakness and Fatigue

Research shows that just a week of not eating enough protein can affect the muscles responsible for your posture and movement, especially if you're 55 or older. And over time, a lack of protein can make you lose muscle mass, which in turn cuts your strength, makes it harder to keep your balance, and slows your metabolism. It can also lead to anemia, when your cells don't get enough oxygen, which makes you tired.

Hunger

This one might seem obvious. Protein fuels you. It's one of three sources of calories, along with carbs and fats. If you want to eat a lot of the time even though you have regular meals, you may need more protein. Studies have found that eating foods with protein helps you feel fuller throughout the day.

Slow-Healing Injuries

People who are low on protein often find their cuts and scrapes take longer to get better. The same seems to be true of sprains and other exercise-related mishaps. It could be another effect of your body not making enough collagen. It's found in connective tissues as well as your skin. To make blood clot, you need proteins, too.

Getting or Staying Sick

Amino acids in your blood help your immune system make antibodies that activate white blood cells to fight off viruses, bacteria, and toxins. You need protein to digest and absorb other nutrients that keep you healthy. There's also evidence that protein can change the levels of disease-fighting "good" bacteria in your gut.

Who Might Come Up Short?

Most Americans get plenty of protein. People who don't get enough usually have an overall poor diet. Elderly people and people with cancer may have trouble eating as much protein as they need. Severe malnutrition from lack of protein is called kwashiorkor. It's more common in developing countries, especially with children, or after a natural disaster.

12 Tips for Better Meetings...

In the planning phase ...

    Set clear goals. What is the purpose of this meeting? "Togetherness" isn't quite enough.
    Make sure this actually needs to be a meeting. Problem-solving, decisionmaking, and discussions work well in a meeting format, but for other activities, a shared Google doc or a mass email can work just as well.
    Invite the key stakeholders. It's frustrating to come up with a "great" idea in a meeting, only to have it shot down by a manager who wasn't on the invite list.
    Write and circulate an agenda, so everyone can come prepared.

During the meeting ...

    Reiterate and stick to the agenda. No point in writing one if you're just going to ramble off topic.
    Keep it short and sweet, the exact way Michael Scott wouldn't.
    Steer the conversation away from expressions of futility ("Nothing can be done," "It's hopeless"), and towards the posing of questions ("How can we improve [x] given that [y] didn't work?")

    Encourage participation from everyone. When people just sit and passively receive information, they tend to tune out and wonder why the meeting wasn't an email.
    Treat everyone's comments with respect. Mocking or minimizing an idea, even a terrible one, discourages other people from speaking up.
    Joke around! An upbeat atmosphere is more conducive to collaboration.

After the meeting ...

    Send out meeting minutes promptly. Two managers who remember a big decision differently can lead to a world of inefficiency.
    Send out a quick survey, soliciting feedback on the meeting — and use this to plan the next meeting. This turns even the worst meetings into learning opportunities.

Einstein Worried That Science Can't Explain "The Now"

Even a simple time frame called 'Now' can be perplexing to define!

Einstein Worried That Science Can't Explain "The Now"
September 19, 2017
Written by Ashley Hamer

You're reading these words right now.

We can say that even though we don't know when you'll read this. We can't say you read them yesterday or will read them tomorrow, but we say that right now, you're reading the word "now." That's how special "now" is. And yet, for all the thought that's been devoted to time, science doesn't consider "now" as different from the future or the past. Don't take our word for it — Albert Einstein himself struggled with this conundrum.

Einstein's Worry

In 1963, philosopher Rudolf Carnap recalled a conversation he had with Einstein about what Einstein called "the Now." "Once, Einstein said that the problem of the Now worried him seriously," Carnap wrote. "He explained that the experience of the Now means something special for man, something essentially different from the past and the future, but that this important difference does not and cannot occur within physics. That this experience cannot be grasped by science seemed to him a matter of painful but inevitable resignation." He suspected, Carnap continued, "that there is something essential about the Now which is just outside of the realm of science."

Scientists hardly touched the concept of time until Einstein came along. Though he couldn't explain time itself, he did show some peculiar things about it: that, to a stationary observer, time flows more slowly for a moving object, and that the greater the force of gravity, the slower time flows. But he — and no one since — could explain what made the present moment objectively different than the past or the future.

What's Wrong With Now?

Much of this puzzle comes down to the fact that science centers on objective reality, and the present moment is defined by your experience of it. Because of that, some scientists say the present moment doesn't actually exist at all.

In an article for Nature, physicist N. David Mermin recalled that when he told another physicist that he was writing about "the Now," the physicist responded, "Ah, you're going to explain why we all have that illusion." In his article, Mermin shot back that the present moment isn't an illusion, but evidence that we need to include personal experience in science's physical description of the world. We have no choice, after all: every scientific observation is filtered through our human experience in some way, whether it's the way our eyes work or the quirks of our brains.

Richard Muller, another physicist that has thought about this conundrum, thinks 21st-century science is at the same stage of understanding the Now as it was in its early-20th-century understanding of gravity. Einstein wanted to come up with a single formula that would unify all the forces in the universe but couldn't. That's because there were several other forces we hadn't yet discovered; now, we're finally getting close to explaining gravity.

Likewise, now that we understand more about the way the universe works with respect to space and time, we might have the tools to understand the Now. Whether that understanding gets to an objective truth or gives more credence to the individual experience, well — we'll just have to wait until then is now.

British Empire Stole $45 Trillion from India!

Dr Jason Hickel is an academic at the University of London and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Colonialism: How the British Empire Stole $45 Trillion from India. And Lied About It.
By Jason Hickel
Al Jazeera 14 December 2018

There is a story that is commonly told in Britain that the colonisation of India – as horrible as it may have been – was not of any major economic benefit to Britain itself. If anything, the administration of India was a cost to Britain. So the fact that the empire was sustained for so long – the story goes – was a gesture of Britain’s benevolence.

New research by the renowned economist Utsa Patnaik – just published by Columbia University Press – deals a crushing blow to this narrative. Drawing on nearly two centuries of detailed data on tax and trade, Patnaik calculated that Britain drained a total of nearly $45 trillion from India during the period 1765 to 1938.

It’s a staggering sum. For perspective, $45 trillion is 17 times more than the total annual gross domestic product of the United Kingdom today.

How did this come about?

It happened through the trade system. Prior to the colonial period, Britain bought goods like textiles and rice from Indian producers and paid for them in the normal way – mostly with silver – as they did with any other country. But something changed in 1765, shortly after the East India Company took control of the subcontinent and established a monopoly over Indian trade.

Here’s how it worked. The East India Company began collecting taxes in India, and then cleverly used a portion of those revenues (about a third) to fund the purchase of Indian goods for British use. In other words, instead of paying for Indian goods out of their own pocket, British traders acquired them for free, “buying” from peasants and weavers using money that had just been taken from them.

It was a scam – theft on a grand scale. Yet most Indians were unaware of what was going on because the agent who collected the taxes was not the same as the one who showed up to buy their goods. Had it been the same person, they surely would have smelled a rat.

Some of the stolen goods were consumed in Britain, and the rest were re-exported elsewhere. The re-export system allowed Britain to finance a flow of imports from Europe, including strategic materials like iron, tar and timber, which were essential to Britain’s industrialisation. Indeed, the Industrial Revolution depended in large part on this systematic theft from India.
‘Britain Would Collapse If It Tried to Pay Back the Money It Drained From India’

On top of this, the British were able to sell the stolen goods to other countries for much more than they “bought” them for in the first place, pocketing not only 100 percent of the original value of the goods but also the markup.

After the British Raj took over in 1847, colonisers added a special new twist to the tax-and-buy system. As the East India Company’s monopoly broke down, Indian producers were allowed to export their goods directly to other countries. But Britain made sure that the payments for those goods nonetheless ended up in London.

How did this work? Basically, anyone who wanted to buy goods from India would do so using special Council Bills – a unique paper currency issued only by the British Crown. And the only way to get those bills was to buy them from London with gold or silver. So traders would pay London in gold to get the bills, and then use the bills to pay Indian producers. When Indians cashed the bills in at the local colonial office, they were “paid” in rupees out of tax revenues – money that had just been collected from them. So, once again, they were not in fact paid at all; they were defrauded.

Meanwhile, London ended up with all of the gold and silver that should have gone directly to the Indians in exchange for their exports.

This corrupt system meant that even while India was running an impressive trade surplus with the rest of the world – a surplus that lasted for three decades in the early 20th century – it showed up as a deficit in the national accounts because the real income from India’s exports was appropriated in its entirety by Britain.

Some point to this fictional “deficit” as evidence that India was a liability to Britain. But exactly the opposite is true. Britain intercepted enormous quantities of income that rightly belonged to Indian producers. India was the goose that laid the golden egg. Meanwhile, the “deficit” meant that India had no option but to borrow from Britain to finance its imports. So the entire Indian population was forced into completely unnecessary debt to their colonial overlords, further cementing British control.

Britain used the windfall from this fraudulent system to fuel the engines of imperial violence – funding the invasion of China in the 1840s and the suppression of the Indian Rebellion in 1857. And this was on top of what the Crown took directly from Indian taxpayers to pay for its wars. As Patnaik points out, “the cost of all Britain’s wars of conquest outside Indian borders were charged always wholly or mainly to Indian revenues.”

And that’s not all. Britain used this flow of tribute from India to finance the expansion of capitalism in Europe and regions of European settlement, like Canada and Australia. So not only the industrialisation of Britain but also the industrialisation of much of the Western world was facilitated by extraction from the colonies.

Patnaik identifies four distinct economic periods in colonial India from 1765 to 1938, calculates the extraction for each, and then compounds at a modest rate of interest (about 5 percent, which is lower than the market rate) from the middle of each period to the present. Adding it all up, she finds that the total drain amounts to $44.6 trillion. This figure is conservative, she says, and does not include the debts that Britain imposed on India during the Raj.

These are eye-watering sums. But the true costs of this drain cannot be calculated. If India had been able to invest its own tax revenues and foreign exchange earnings in development – as Japan did – there’s no telling how history might have turned out differently. India could very well have become an economic powerhouse. Centuries of poverty and suffering could have been prevented.

All of this is a sobering antidote to the rosy narrative promoted by certain powerful voices in Britain. The conservative historian Niall Ferguson has claimed that British rule helped “develop” India. While he was prime minister, David Cameron asserted that British rule was a net help to India.

This narrative has found considerable traction in the popular imagination: according to a 2014 YouGov poll, 50 percent of people in Britain believe that colonialism was beneficial to the colonies.

Yet during the entire 200-year history of British rule in India, there was almost no increase in per capita income. In fact, during the last half of the 19th century – the heyday of British intervention – income in India collapsed by half. The average life expectancy of Indians dropped by a fifth from 1870 to 1920. Tens of millions died needlessly of policy-induced famine.

Britain didn’t develop India. Quite the contrary – as Patnaik’s work makes clear – India developed Britain.

What does this require of Britain today? An apology? Absolutely. Reparations? Perhaps – although there is not enough money in all of Britain to cover the sums that Patnaik identifies. In the meantime, we can start by setting the story straight. We need to recognise that Britain retained control of India not out of benevolence but for the sake of plunder and that Britain’s industrial rise didn’t emerge sui generis from the steam engine and strong institutions, as our schoolbooks would have it, but depended on violent theft from other lands and other peoples.