Up and Down

 Iran put up a website/satellite TV station to give their version of the news. To make it easy to find, they bought a .com site from a western ISP. The US moved to take down that site, PressTv.Com. Anyone who tries to access it gets

But those Persians have some Internet-savvy experts who switched to PressTV.ir and that site is up and running.

A couple of years ago, the Taliban put up a site, alemarahenglish.com but the US shut that site down. The Taliban tried alemarahenglish.net , but the US control .com and .net and took that down as well. For at least a year, the Taliban could not get their ideas across, but they eventually found an Internet-savvy person who set up their new site, alemarahenglish.af which the US cannot block.

The USAF project manager who funded the creation of the Internet made it so the US military could still communicate during and after WWIII, so the Internet is very resilient if one knows what one is doing. And now both the Persians and the Taliban know.

The Russians chose .com for their website, and, after the US CIA took over the Ukraine in 2014 and encouraged the Western Ukrainians to kill the ethnic Russians who inhabit the Eastern Ukraine (the Ukraine splits at the Dnieper River, with those to the West mostly disliking ethnic Russians and those to the East mostly ethnic Russians), Russia complained, but did very little for 8 years.

When the USSR collapsed, the CIA managed to make Yeltsin president, and he let the CIA dissolve the USSR then destroy Russia as long as they kept him well supplied with vodka. When Yeltsin got sick and had to step down, the CIA had already dismantled the Soviet Union, the Russian military, Russian industry, Russian schools, and also insisted that Yeltsin's successor must have CIA approval, so they picked an obscure mayor no one had ever heard of, and he always lauded everything the US did, while secretly rebuilding Russia, so secretly that the CIA did not notice. In 2011, the US wanted to destroy Libya, and put the destruction of Libya before the UN Security Council, and Russia voted a strong 'Yes!'. In 2013, the US put the destruction of Syria before the UN Security Council and Russia did not vote. Not as good as a strong 'Yes!' but still acceptable (and Syria still exists only because PM Cameron put the destruction of Syria up to a vote in Parliament, and the UK Parliament voted, 'NO!').

However, when the CIA took over the Ukraine in 2014, Putin had Russia annex the Crimea, even though it had always been Ukrainian since 1954. The CIA were furious, but were not quite ready to fight Russia. Russia forced the Ukraine to sign the Minsk agreement that ethnic Russians would not be harmed, but the Ukraine never bothered with the Minsk agreement and killed about 10,000 ethnic Russians between 2014 and 2022.

Then the CIA said the Ukraine would join NATO and host a huge US nuclear arsenal that could reach Russia in about 1 minute, so Russia would not have time to respond, and the US would have total destruction of Russia available. There would be no need to actually nuke Russia, the Russian leadership would know that the US could do so and Russia could not stop them nor would Russia have anything left with which to retaliate, so MAD would be gone, only the AD of Russia if Russia did not do exactly as the US told them to do, probably division into four or more unarmed, independent puppet states.

So the evil Putin invaded the Ukraine and says he will demilitarise and de-CIA the Ukraine.

And a week later, the Russian English, French, and German channels are down. The satellite TV is down. The websites are down. Since they chose .com for the English, French, and German sites, the US had no difficulty shutting all of them down. A huge DDOS attack means one does not get, as one did with the old Taliban site, 'No such site,' instead one gets a blank page until the 'Timed out' message appears. Russia appears distracted by their pursuit of the CIA in the Ukraine: I know Russia have plenty of Internet-savvy experts who could get the site back up, but for now, all the Russia information website and satellite TV channels are down (except their Arabic channel which is still operational).

And I have no idea when the Russian sites will be back up. They've been down for about 12 hours now, and show no sign of coming back to life. I am getting a new message: 'You might be a bot. You are not allowed to access this site.' So that's stopping the DDOS, along with everyone else.

I hope the Russians get their Internet news channels and satellite news channels back up and running. For now, I must rely on the Iranian and Taliban sites to get a version of the news which is not the Western version (Qatar is in bed with the US, so al-Jazeera tends to repeat the US version of the news).

And for now, no way to watch any Russian news, except in Arabic.