US Blocks Websites it Dislikes

 For several years, going back to 2019 that I know of, the Taliban had a website, alemarahenglish.net

Then the US noticed, and had the company that sold them the name alemarahenglish.net remove it from all nameservers, so if one tries to access the website, the web cannot find it. Every web address is a number having 4 to 12 digits called the Internet Protocol or IP address. Google is at 142.250.181.14

Of course, very few of us know that Google is at 142.250.181.14, so some clever person came up with the nameservers that look up the names, find the numerical IP address, and allow your computer to connect. To connect to, e.g., google.com, your computer browser must have the address of a nameserver (or you would have to give your browser the IP address of google.com), and that nameserver searches all the nameservers holding all the registered names on the Internet, until it finds the IP address of Google.com and sends your browser to 142.250.181.14

The US went to the owners of the nameservers that knew the name of the Taliban website and its IP address, a company called Tucows, and had Tucows remove the Taliban's name, alemarahenglish.net from the nameserver, so if one tries to connect, every web browser just says, 'We’re having trouble finding that site.' So no web brower can connect to the Taliban website. If I had saved the IP address, I could check, but it looked like the ISP hosting the Taliban website took the website down, so even if one knew the IP address, one still could not connect. (One typically buys the name for one's website from a company that sells names, and then finds another company to host one's website.)

The US tried to do that to Iran. Iran had a webserver, presstv.com 

Iran had to buy the name presstv.com from a vendor outside Iran, and the US had the company that owns the nameserver that had the presstv.com name point to a US government webserver

Sadly, the civil servant who funded the development of the Internet wanted it to be a tool that would allow the US military to communicate during a war with the USSR, when the USSR would be doing everything a superpower could do to block the US military from communicating.

So the Iranians put their news website on presstv.ir which has its own nameserver, and the US has been unable to block it.

Net: it would behove the Taliban to work with Iran, Russia, and/or the PRC, any of whom could get the Taliban website up and running in a day or so, and protected so the US cannot block it.

However, the Taliban were created by the US to make trouble for the USSR, and they are still designated terrorists under Russian law. Also, they are a sect of Islam that hates the Ayatollahs. And the CIA has been telling them lies about the PRC genocide of Muslims in Xinjiang. So it is not clear if they will be able to make friends with Iran, Russia, or the PRC, something they desperately need to do.

Before, when the Taliban ran Afghanistan from 1996 until 2001, only 3 countries gave them diplomatic recognition: Pakistan and 2 small Arab countries. They could not convince any other country to give them recognition or a seat at the UN. Of course, they were happy to live in the 7th century: if the Prophet did not have it, the Taliban's Afghanistan didn't need it. But that was 20 years ago, and the new and improved Taliban would like to live a little differently. For which they need other countries to recognise them and help them.

Russia and the PRC did not close their Embassies when the Taliban took over Afghanistan. The Russian Embassy is fully open, while the PRC had most of its staff return to the PRC but left a skeleton staff to keep the Embassy nominally open. Most European countries, and, of course, the US, closed their Embassies in Afghanistan.

So some of us are wondering in what direction Afghanistan will be going. And with whom.

12 US Marines and a Navy Medic killed. The US does not forgive. Or forget.

An ISIS-K (the K is for Khorasan, part of the Ancient Persian Empire that is now part of Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan) suicide bomber has killed 13 US servicepersons, 12 Marines and a Navy medic (he also killed more than 60 Afghans, but they don't count). His ISIS-K name was Abdul Rehman Al-Loghri, with the al-Loghri meaning he was from the village of Loghman.

Since the US does not forgive or forget (according to President Biden, who has trouble remembering the names of the people who work for him) the US must drone some peasant farmers in Loghman, say that intelligence proves they were the members of ISIS-K that sponsored the attack, and justice has been served. (And if anyone hands out classified information that those ISIS-K terrorists the US killed included some babies, that person will be tracked down and gaoled for life, while the drone operators and their commanders will all get medals for Great Services Rendered, protecting the US from terrorists.)

President Biden says the US will stay another 4 days, so we might see more attacks, maybe with names like al-Kandahari or al-Herati, so more to drone.

Getting the heck out of Afghanistan

 St Joe says he is doing the exit from Afghanistan perfectly. It would have been very difficult a month ago, it would be very difficult a month from now, so no matter when we left, it would have been exactly as it is now as long as he is the one directing the exit, and a lot worse if some else (meaning Trump) had been directing it, because he is doing it perfectly.

Fox News, of course, disagrees vehemently, of course, because they're Fox. So does Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, but she was condemned by all her readers: they all wrote that St Joe is doing it perfectly, and if she were doing it, it would be a lot worse.

Some ask, if the exit were always going to be so difficult, if there is absolutely no way anyone could possibly get all our people out, shouldn't we have stayed, the way we did in Germany and Japan after WWII?

St Joe says we had one job to do in Afghanistan, we got it done when we killed Osama, and there was no point wasting even one more US life (except for those we'll have to leave behind to be murdered by the terrorists, but there would never have been a way to save any of them, and lots more US soldiers would die if we stayed any longer).

Again, Fox and Ms Dowd disagree with St Joe, but just about all the New York Times readers agree with him and hate both Fox and Ms Dowd.

The critics of St Joe do have a few flaws: he was warned that the Taliban could take over the entire country, making it very difficult to get all our people out, very soon after the end of August. But, of course, St Joe planned a massive evacuation, with the help of the Ghani government, before the end of August. No one believed the Taliban would take over on 15 August. All the warnings were that it might happen right after August (and St Joe said he didn't believe any of those warnings, he knew the Ghani government would last for years after the total US withdrawal).

I read about Saigon: Fred Reed wrote that Saigon actually went far, far better than Kabul. The helicopters took all the embassy staff, Americans and Vietnamese, to US ships that took them to the US. In Kabul, the helicopters took only the Americans in the embassy, and only to the Kabul airport, where there was lots of processing before they could be taken to someplace like Qatar, and more processing before they could make it to Germany, then more processing before they can make it back to the US.

Also, as the North Vietnamese Army closed in on Saigon, all Americans in Vietnam were told to go to an airfield. Most brought their Vietnamese relatives and friends, and refused to leave without all their relatives and friends. The US government was afraid of leaving any US hostages, so they agreed to take everyone, and got them all out before the North Vietnamese Army arrived.

In Kabul, of course, it is very difficult to get to the airport, and the US says, 'You're on your own to get to the airport, and you'd better have all your papers in perfect order or don't bother.'

And as St Joe says, we know we're going to have to leave a lot of people we promised to get out, but that we'll be leaving the fewest possible number because of his brilliant management of the evacuation, no one could possibly have left fewer behind that he will leave. And again, most New York Times readers figure he's telling the TRVTH, the whole TRVTH, and nothing but the TRVTH.

Sadly, most polls show the New York Times readers do not represent the majority of the voters, so the Democrats might have a teeny bit of trouble in the coming mid-terms, but the voters are likely to have forgotten Kabul by the next presidential election. And there's a very good chance St Joe will stand down about two months after the mid-terms, letting St Harris take over for the next 10 years.

Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) in Kabul???

 As President Biden said, the legitimate Afghan government, the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, has 300,000 well trained soldiers and an advanced air force, so the Taliban, about 75,000 guerilla fighters with primitive weapons, could not possibly pose a threat.

And he was right. The Taliban don't seem to exist, and it was not the Taliban that toppled the puppet Afghan government installed by the US. The opposition call themselves the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan Mujahideen, and it was feared they might be able to take over a large part of Afghanistan over a period of a year. That year lasted about 7 days, and the puppet president installed by the US resigned (after getting the heck out of Afghanistan).

The Western Press still calls the Mujahideen the Taliban, so I guess they could call that land that led the military that occupied their country for 20 years the Aggressors, and always refer to them that way: after all, your name for someone from a different ethnic group is much better than what they call themselves.

The Western media love to demonise the Mujahideen. I guess, if I know Joe and Sam are fighting, and Joe is from my ethnic group, I gotta listen to Joe's side of it and figure it's all that evil Sam's fault. Of course, I could listen to both sides. Nah. Why listen to anyone not from my own ethnic group?

However, the Mujahideen have their own website, so one can read their side of it. Maybe. Their website was down for a couple of days, but now it's back up. The US bragged about taking down the Persian Press site, so they might have blocked the website, or it might be that their webmaster is somewhat lacking in the requisite skills needed to keep the website up (or that their finances are limited).

Their own website presents them as very different from how they're presented by the Western press. Of course, they might be lying on their website, but the Western Press has a habit of lying ever since the Spanish-American War, when the newspapers promised, 'We'll provide the War!' and then they did. So I figure I've got massive evidence that the Western press lies, and no evidence one way or the other about the Mujahideen website. So, for now, I think I'll give more credence to the Mujahideen website than to the Western Press.

Out of Afghanistan

 Back in 2000 and early 2001, the Western Press had horror stories about the Afghanistan Taliban. No school for girls. No healthcare for females. No female could leave purdah (South Asian for harem or seraglio) so girls could not go to school, women could not go to hospital or to a physician, a male physician was not allowed into a woman's purdah unless he was her husband, brother, son, or father, and a female physician was not allowed to leave her own purdah, so no healthcare except for the very few females who had a husband, brother, son, or father who was a physician (or maybe another of her husband's wives was a female physician).

Of course, the 'woman' reporter who 'spent a year in Afghanistan researching that story' might have been a man who could not find Afghanistan on a map, but, since the Taliban destroyed some statues that were almost 2,000 years old because they were not Islamic, it is quite possible to believe that those newspaper stories were true.

However, Ted Rall went to Afghanistan in 2001 to see what the war was about, and again about 10 years later, and said the Taliban were completely different: different people, different goals.

Actually, right after the 9/11 attack, the CIA identified the attackers as Arabs, 15 from Saudi. Bush, Jr quickly corrected that mistake: the attack was planned, coordinated, and arranged in Afghanistan, so the US military were sent to Afghanistan to eradicate all the jihadists who were planning another attack. The proof that the attackers were really from Afghanistan was that no one on the planes had an Afghan passport or visa in their passport, proving that Afghanistan carefully concealed their primary role in the attack. And the US had that proof, but, of course, it was all Top Secret, so no patriotic American, or any American ally, would ever want to see any of that proof.

So off the US military went to Afghanistan in 2001, and now the ground forces are coming back in 2021, and the war will be prosecuted by drones controlled from the US.

Total success! Great Job! Another unmitigated US victory!!!

CoViD from the Wuhan Institute of Virology?

 Back in 2020, Trump said China caused the CoViD-19 pandemic, and the establishment media all agreed that everything Trump said was false, so the virus never came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

 “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” was written by a group of virologists and others in the Lancet on February 19, 2020, and this was widely quoted (and referenced) by those who wanted to refute Trump's claim. Most of us expected the teams researching the virus to find the original bat version and the intermediate host. It was thought to most likely be a pangolin. Only the infected pangolin has not been found. Still, it was early. Surely the bat and the intermediate species would eventually turn up.

However, after 20 Jan 2021, Trump was no longer president, and was barred from all social media. The establishment media still run anti-Trump articles, but no longer runs multiple such articles on a daily basis.

And then President Biden said the virus came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and this quickly became the standard corporate media theory of how it originated.

In support of the now accepted Biden theory, which, of course, had no relation to any of Trump's ridiculous ideas of how the virus originated, Nicholas Wade wrote "The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?" The paper has a long and detailed argument that strongly suggests the virus was developed in a lab. He wrote about that Lancet article that ' It later turned out that the Lancet letter had been organized and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York. Daszak’s organization funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If the SARS2 virus had indeed escaped from research he funded, Daszak would be potentially culpable. This acute conflict of interest was not declared to the Lancet’s readers. To the contrary, the letter concluded, “We declare no competing interests.” ' which rather reduced the weight of that Lancet article. We all know that the scientists on the payroll of tobacco companies continued (until it was legally prohibited) to publish papers saying that the science proved that smoking was harmless, and probably had many health benefits. And it now looks like Daszak's paper fits that category.

Wade notes that, in the case of SARS and MERS, it was quickly  discovered that the virus had started in a bat, then infected a civet in the case of SARS and a camel in the case of MERS, and was then transmitted to humans, where is was more deadly than CoViD-19 in terms of infection fatality rate (IFR), but less transmissible. However, we still have not found the original bat virus nor the intermediate host.

Mr Wade says there is strong evidence CoViD-19 must have been created by what is called gain-of-function research. This is done in military biological warfare labs, especially in Fort Dettrick in Maryland. It is also done in civilian virology laboratories where they are looking to first develop particularly infectious and deadly viruses and then study how to stop them. The virus sequence is such that it would be very difficult for it to have occurred in nature, it looks like it could only have been created in a gain-of-function research lab. Mr Wade provides ample evidence in support of his claim, and, now that it's President Biden, not Trump saying it came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, many accept Mr Wade's contention that it was a biological weapons project that escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

What strongly weakens Mr Wade's contention that it was a biological weapons programme at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is that it was proved in 2021 that the US funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology research. Dr Fauci said the research was too dangerous to perform in the US, so the US funded it in Wuhan. The PRC responded that the US would be insane to fund biological warfare research in a country it considered one of its two worst enemies. Which is a very convincing argument that Wuhan was doing prophylactic gain-of-function research before 2020 in an effort to discover new and better ways to stop any future pandemic, and not as a biological warfare project (unlike Fort Dettrick).

It is also obvious, since the US was funding the research, that material was going back and forth, so the CoViD-19 virus might have been created at Fort Dettrick and sent to Wuhan for further study, where a researcher, who had no idea how dangerous it was, studied it in a BSL-2 (biosafety level 2) laboratory, which is about the same as a normal dentist's office, got infected and then went shopping in the Wuhan Wet Market.

While it now looks obvious from Mr Wade's paper that a virus engineered in a gain-of-function research programme escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, it is not clear if the virus was engineered in Wuhan or in Maryland.

It is clear that if, as seems highly likely, the virus escaped from the Wuhan lab, it was accidental and not a PRC conspiracy to infect the West.

The claim that the PRC covered up the virus has a tiny bit of truth in it. The PRC released a report on 31 December 2019 that they had a few patients with a new respiratory virus, and the new virus might be as deadly and infectious as SARS. The comments on the report was that there was no evidence it was actually transmissible between humans, nor that it was deadly. The first patient was admitted on 1 December 2019, most of those infected had proven links to the Wuhan Wet Market, and no one had died.

The first death was on 10 January 2020. A doctor wanted to raise the alarm, but the Wuhan CPC ordered him not to say anything, because they had planned a huge party with 40,000 guests to celebrate Chinese New Year. So the doctor called Beijing, and on 19 January 2020, a team from Beijing came, studied the cases for one day, and went back to Beijing. On 20 January 2020, the PRC announced to the world that it had a new, infectious, and deadly virus in Wuhan. On 23 January 2020, the PRC closed Wuhan: no one could leave, and only essential workers could enter. Tens of thousands of doctors, nurses, and construction workers flew into Wuhan, but no one flew out after 23 January 2020. And Beijing fired the entire leadership of the Wuhan CPC.

The West had from 20 January 2020 to get ready (it would have been much better if the Wuhan CPC had started taking steps against the virus on 10 January 2020, which is why they were all fired for incompetence).

Sadly, the West had outsourced all PPE manufacture to the PRC, so the PRC had plenty of PPE to fight CoViD-19 in the PRC, but not enough to supply the rest of the world. And without adequate PPE, it was very hard to fight the virus. The US had the most infections and deaths because it is the 3rd largest country. In terms of per capita deaths, the US is about the same as Europe and Latin America.

But the Democrats figure CoViD-19 was a G_dsend, because it got rid of Trump. They all figure 600,000 US deaths was a miniscule price to pay to not have another 4 years of Trump.

Out of Afghanistan?

After the US was attacked on 9/11, some accused Saudi Arabia of having a part in the attack. The CIA website, cia.gov had a page with the names and nationalities of the 19 hijackers. That page has since been moved to 911myths as well it should. The page lists 15 of the hijackers as Saudis, but that was before the attack was properly investigated. The first version, before it was properly massaged into the proper shape, was that 19 Arabs, 15 of them Saudis, met in the Arabian Peninsula, decided to destroy the World Trade Center, flew to Berlin, then London, then the US where four of them took jet passenger airliner flying training in Florida, then, on 9/11/2001 (in US date notation) they hijacked four aeroplanes. The hijacking relied on the hijacking protocol from before 9/11: do whatever the hijackers demand, get the planes safely on the ground, and then let the police deal with the hijackers. So it proved easy to hijack the four planes, and the hijackers then used two of them to destroy the World Trade Center, one to damage the Pentagon, and one crashed when the passengers tried to take control of the plane from the hijackers. Just because we have the records from the flight passenger lists, from their passports, from the flight training schools in Florida is irrelevant, of course, that is not how the US investigates major crimes, it uses much more sophisticated methods.

Ignoring such useless distractions as facts, proof, and evidence, Bush, Jr immediately announced that the attack was planned in Afghanistan, and the main hijackers were members of the Taliban, so the US troops went into Afghanistan in October, 2001. The main perpetrator of 9/11 was said to be Osama bin Laden, who was a) a senior member of the Taliban or b) someone protected by the Taliban or c) someone whose main base was in Afghanistan and who was closely allied with the Taliban or d) maybe something else. What, exactly, was, of course, irrelevant. Afghanistan was responsible for 9/11. Of course, Osama was never found in Afghanistan, but no matter. Osama did say that the US World Trade Center housed many murderers who must be killed. How, exactly, they must be killed he did not say, but bombs were planted in the World Trade Center in 1993, killing six people and injuring thousands, and the plotting to destroy the World Trade Center continued until it was destroyed, and it was all Osama's doing. Of course, many Imams in Saudi gave their Friday khutbahs saying that the World Trade Center must be destroyed, but that does not change the fact that Afghanistan was responsible. Those khutbahs were based on facts that would not be revealed to the world until after 9/11/2001, when the motivation for 9/11 appeared in the book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins, published in 2004. He explained how he convinced Indonesia to accept a predatory loan for a construction project that was supposed to pay for itself, with returns more than enough to service the loan. Only the project returned nothing, and the loan was unforgivable sovereign debt, so Indonesia had to repay. Subsistence farmland was converted into cash crops, and the former farmers starved to death. Mines were dug and the waste dumped in the drinking water and many more died from having no potable water. So the Imams and Osama all said the people in the World Trade Center had murdered more than 1 billion Muslims and must be killed. As Perkins made clear, there is no evidence that any of the people who arranged for the economic hit men to go making those predatory loans worked in the World Trade Center, but Osama and the Imams were still convinced.

The total number killed by predatory loans is in the millions, not a billion, and included only a small percentage of Muslims. John Perkins and the other Economic Hit Men foisted those predatory loans off on Latin America, Asia, and Africa, so most of those who died were not Muslim but Christians, Buddhists, & etc., but still, those Saudi Imams and Osama blamed the World Trade Center for murdering Muslims, they knew what those economic hit men had been doing.

So obviously, Osama was entirely to blame (well, plus the many who followed him, but he was still the main one, those Saudi Imams who said the same things have been found blameless by the US courts, the best legal system in the entire world).

Obama asked actors to pose as physicians and say they were giving free vaccines to get Pakistanis to let them investigate homes in Pakistan looking for (and finding) Osama. Since then, many Pakistanis are very reluctant to take vaccines, but this trifle does not detract from Obama's managing to kill the person who was entirely responsible, with hundreds or maybe thousands of others, for the 9/11 attack on the US. Nor does it reduce Afghanistan's guilt. They were entirely responsible for 9/11 (with many other countries) and had to be punished, and punished severely.

Most commentators agree that Afghanistan remains a big problem. They were entirely responsible for 9/11, and, as soon as the US pulls out, they're sure to do it again. But Biden says the US has been in Afghanistan too long, even though it was the presence of the US in Afghanistan that prevented the terrorists from committing another 9/11.

The fact that none of the 19 named as hijackers had ever been anywhere near Afghanistan, as proven by their passports that were scanned in full and recorded when they entered the US does not reduce Afghanistan's guilt. Osama was there. Briefly, but he was there. So it is clearly necessary for US troops to remain to keep America safe, and Biden is letting the US guard down by withdrawing.

Biden has promised that the troops will not foolishly return to the US, they'll be relocated to other bases in the area, and their intelligence will direct the daily drone strikes on Afghanistan run from the US. Those strikes will kill the many, many terrorists still there, terrorists who include many infants and great-grandmothers.

So the US will sort-of, kind-of be 'out of Afghanistan' but at least the drone strikes will continue, and surveillance of Afghanistan will continue from bases near Afghanistan.

But still, all the experts say that Afghanistan does nothing but plot attacks on the US like 9/11, and only the presence of US troops ever since 9/11 has prevented a repeat, so, even with the daily drone strikes and constant intense surveillance, Afghanistan is sure to do another 9/11 if US troops do not remain to prevent it.