The Myth that Edward Snowden Chose to Live in Russia

The myth that Edward Snowden Chose to Live in Russia is dispelled by listening to Obama's White House Staffer, Ben Rhodes, one of the people who forced Snowden to be stuck in Russia:

An excerpt from Greenwald's article, "Ben Rhodes' Book Proves Obama Officials' Lies, and His Own, About Edward Snowden and Russia: It is hard to overstate the sociopathy of US national security officials: their casual willingness to blatantly lie about the gravest matters is limitless":

Here are Rhodes' own words:

There was one other, more important signal. Around the time of our second meeting, Edward Snowden was stuck in the Moscow airport, trying to find someone who would take him in. Reportedly, he wanted to go to Venezuela, transiting through Havana, but I knew that if the Cubans aided Snowden, any rapprochement between our countries would prove impossible. I pulled Alejandro Castro aside and said I had a message that came from President Obama. I reminded him that the Cubans had said they wanted to give Obama “political space” so that he could take steps to improve relations. “If you take in Snowden,” I said, “that political space will be gone.” I never spoke to the Cubans about this issue again. A few days later, back in Washington, I woke up to a news report: “Former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden got stuck in the transit zone of a Moscow airport because Havana said it would not let him fly from Russia to Cuba, a Russian newspaper reported.” I took it as a message: The Cubans were serious about improving relations.

Glenn Greenwald comments:

Ever since Edward Snowden received asylum from Russia in 2013, Obama officials have repeatedly maligned his motives and patriotism by citing his "choice” to take up residence there. It has long been clear that this narrative was a lie: Snowden, after meeting with journalists in Hong Kong, intended only to transit through Moscow and then Havana on his way to seek asylum in Latin America. He was purposely prevented from leaving Russia — trapped in the Moscow airport — by the very Obama officials who then cynically weaponized his presence there to imply he was a civil-liberties hypocrite for “choosing” to live in such a repressive country or, even worse, a Kremlin agent or Russian spy.

But now we have absolute, definitive proof that Snowden never intended to stay in Russia but was deliberately prevented from leaving by the same Obama officials who exploited the predicament which they created. The proof was supplied unintentionally in the memoir of one of Obama's senior national security advisers, Ben Rhodes, entitled The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House. It is hard to overstate how dispositively Rhodes’ own book proves that Obama officials generally, and Rhodes specifically, lied blatantly and cavalierly to the public about what happened: a level of sustained and conscious lying that can be explained only by sociopathy.

The memoir of Rhodes, now appropriately an MSNBC contributor, is an incredibly self-serving homage to himself that repeatedly attempts to demonstrate his own importance and accomplishments. The passage about Rhodes’ conduct regarding Snowden is very much aligned with those goals. While repeatedly emphasizing how traumatic the Snowden revelations were for the Obama administrations, Rhodes boasts of the crucial role he played in preventing Snowden from leaving Russia as the NSA whistleblower was desperately attempting to do so — exactly the opposite of what people like Rhodes and Hillary Clinton were telling the public about Snowden.

It is really beyond words how willing these people are to lie.

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The Dangers of Living in an Impoverished Ever-Malleable Present

My dog lives in the eternal present. It's OK for dogs to do so, but not OK for people. People need a sense of history to avoid the mistakes of the past.  People need a foundation of hard-earned knowledge on which to make sense of the future or else they will not ever accomplish great things.  Without a solid foundation of knowledge based on history, people will live like dogs.

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

George Orwell - 1984

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Matt Taibbi: Truly, Give Peace a Chance

Matt Taibbi urges that we give peace a chance, especially in light of the abysmal track record of America's war hawks.

We spend a trillion dollars a year on war and none on nonviolence.…

The “domino theory” we used to justify invading Vietnam had roots in Munich conference nightmares of inevitable world domination.… Over the years we similarly invoked Hitler before attacking Iraq (which left Mesopotamia a borderless 8th-century outpost and spurred a horrific refugee problem) and Libya (which replaced a brutal dictator with no government at all), to say nothing of interventions big and small in Syria, Serbia, Iran, and other spots around the globe, often based on similarly dubious terrors about the peril of affronts to American “credibility.” Something like domino-theory fear was behind the post-1991 idea that we needed to meddle in Russian elections (to prevent the spread of communism anew) and push NATO as close to Russia’s borders as possible.…

When Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, the members of this militarist tribe weren’t sad. They were animated as hell and motivated suddenly to churn out Atlantic editorials celebrating the end of the malaise that for about ten minutes hovered over the cause of American power projection after Afghanistan’s collapse. They still suffer from the disease of modern American thought that endorses “regime change” as a solution to every real or imagined security threat, a reflex that, in case anyone forgot, has ended in tears every time it’s been tried in real life. They believe this is the only road out of the Russia-Ukraine mess. They’re welcome to that belief, but those of us who’d like to note their long track records of being not just wrong but insanely so should be able to express ourselves without being branded traitors. Yes, this time it really could be 1938. It could also be 1914, when a chain-reaction of lunatic escalations spun a localized conflict into a global conflagration costing millions of senseless deaths.…

All those disasters took place because both American and Russian societies are built on war as an organizing principle, and this is where John and Yoko were right: we should give peace a chance. We spend a trillion dollars a year on war and none on nonviolence. This problem is visible in Ukraine policy. People who aren’t trained in conflict resolution but are propagandized to believe in idiocies like the “surgical strike” or “acceptable losses” always think even the thorniest political problems have tactical solutions. They’re more likely to play chicken with nuclear annihilation, maybe by blowing up a pipeline, then risk looking weak via a cease-fire proposal.… Anyone who says this is an easy call has not thought this through, especially given our atrocious record when it comes to trying to to decrease international tension through the use of force. By any measure, we suck at it, and unlike previous wars, we can’t afford to screw this one up.

Either way, the hawks being in charge for so long, and beating the drum for campaigns like Russiagate, means there’s no longer a back channel to negotiate an end to what even the president is calling a new Cuban Missile Crisis. Even Biden is murmuring about maybe giving Putin an “off-ramp” to end this thing, but if pundits have their way, that will never happen. They’d prefer escalation, despite the fact that the next step is world war. These people are crazy, and we should be allowed to say so. Could peaceniks really do worse?

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Gettysburg Address and Lincoln Bust Woke-Washed at Cornell University

A Cornell University Library has removed a display containing a copy of the Gettysburg Address and a bust of Abraham Lincoln from its library based "on a complaint."

A bust of President Abraham Lincoln and a plaque of the Gettysburg address have been removed from a Cornell University library.

"Someone complained, and it was gone," Cornell biology professor Randy Wayne told the College Fix of the matter.

The bust of Lincoln and the bronzed plaque of the former president’s historic 1863 address had been in the Kroch Library, where the university’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections is located, since 2013.

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Why Racism is Complicated

This is an excerpt from a spirited and insightful conversation involving Jordan Peterson and John McWhorter. Why embrace Woke racism? Why claim that it is virtually impossible for modern day "black" people to achieve parity with "whites" while ignoring the many modern day successes of "blacks"? This tactic is essentially a convoluted cop-out. Doing the real work to, for example, raise test scores in distressed schools would require a lot of work. Merely declaring "systemic racism" (without doing anything to help people who are struggling) is easy and gets one robust rounds of applause from the like-minded.

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