Dear friends,
Today I want to ask for your support for two fundraisers, one for one of our “brother in arms” and one for my webmaster.
Russia Insider crowdfunding campaign
Russia Insider is launching its first crowdfunding campaign today. Please check out Charles Bausman’s appeal ( APPEAL: We’ve Launched Russia Insider’s Crowdfunding on Kickstarter. ) and the campaign’s kickstarter page ( Russia Insider – Challenge the Media. Let’s Push Back! ). I just want to add that I think that Russia Insider is unique and absolutely crucial to our community for two reasons. First, Russia Insider is aimed at the western public and it is an attempt to directly and frontally counter-act the multi-billion dollar AngloZionist propaganda machine. Second, and most importantly, unlike, for example, RT, Russia Insider has been created and is run by people from the West, mostly expats, who are thereby showing the world that there is what I call “another West” which is not imperialistic, not russophobic, not anti-Orthodox. To me, there is no overstating the importance of this aspect and this is why I appeal to all of you – Russians and non-Russians – to help Russia Insider. If you think about it, you will certainly agree that Russia Insider is the “ambassador” of all of us, people living in the West, to the Russian people, a clear proof that we, “the other West” exist and that we do oppose the 1%ers regimes we live under and that we are allies of the Russian people.
The Saker blog’s webmaster Gevorg
I think that by now you can all see for yourself how much work has been put in the structure and features of this blog and how many improvements have been made over its original version. All this did not “just happen” – it is the result of many hours of hard work by my webmaster Gevorg. What you have not seen is all the time put in by Gevorg to teach me how to use the various features of WordPress. I can tell you that for me WordPress is infinitely superior to Blogger, not only because it is far more flexible and capable, but also because of the much more sophisticated set of tools it offer the blogger to manage contents. To make a long story short, to get the most out of WordPress you need to 1) fully use its capability to be highly configurable and 2) you have to identify and install special “plugins” which further extend WordPress’ capabilities. Though the result is impressive, it is a lot of work to configure all that and this is also something Gevorg did for me or, should I say, for all of us. Finally, Gevorg did all of this out of the kindness of his heart, I don’t pay him and he never asked for a single dollar. Still, I think that all of us who now benefit from the many hours of work he put into what is really *our* blog owe him a great debt of gratitude and that we all ought to pitch in and contribute a donation for him. I know I will.
Gevorg, who lives in Armenia, does not have his own PayPal account. So here is what I propose to do (with his agreement, of course): send me your donations for Gevorg, just as you would with any other donation, but clearly indicate “FOR GEVORG” on the PayPal message or the check. I will then use my newly create corporation (Saker Analytics, LLC) to transfer the money to him.
Two more things about Gevorg (just to give you an insight into his personality). He is the one who came up with the idea to register the new blog under the domain name TheSaker.is and he is the one who wrote this beautifully defiant “statement of survival”.
Friends, I always feel uncomfortable talking about money or asking for it. But the past year has convinced me that this is an important, I would even say a necessary, thing to do to fight the struggle, to resist the Empire. I can honestly say that our community and our movement need Russia Insider and Gevorg and this is why I appeal to you: if you can, please help them help us and donate.
Many thanks and a big hug to all,
The Saker
For Gevorg, sent in a reward via Paypal.
Also, again I thank him for the new website and all of the very nifty upgrades that make our commenting and reading so much better.
I hope many readers and commenters will step up today and show they are part of the voentorg.
… And it also needs the Saker himself. Time for everyone to do his part and be generous!
When I initially read this on 23 February…
…Gevorg who came up with this idea at the time when our community was attacked on all sides. It is also a clear reply to those who decided that they were with the “Charlies”…
…it reminded me of the vicious verbal attacks, even death threats, directed against the musical group, The Dixie Chicks, for daring to suggest, at one of their concerts in London, considering that like George W. Bush they were from Texas USA, they were ashamed of sharing the same state (province) with him, due to the brutal, unprovoked, illegal 2003 attack of Iraq.
Here’s their music video response, some time later:
[03:55] Dixie Chicks – Not Ready To Make Nice
Love the Dixie Chicks. They had their career blasted for being vocal.
It’s the reaction by southern false patriotism (sort of compensates for the civil war). We get a lot of Special Forces guys and gals from the South. Good people who think following orders from people who they would normally reject as Liberals or one worlders is suddenly patriotic.
Dixie Chicks understood it was time to stand up and say no! They were ostracized.
In fact they have had a great Soldier song: Travelin’ Soldier which should have swept all awards shows but was cast aside generally.
http://www.jango.com/music/Dixie+Chicks?l=0
Brilliant lyrics and musical production. Impossible to duplicate. Dixie Chicks !
Having lost a bunch of teammates from high school, and some of their younger brothers, it really hits home with me.
red ryder, that was the same ‘not ready to make nice’…what about the soldier song ?
So did you donate or what?
how can you say that anonymous…go to your cage please, and stay there.
@
OnanAnon,Q: So did you donate or what?
R: Donations are a private matter. If you do it so you can brag about it, you’d better keep your money where it truly belongs.
yes
money is money
the reason I told Anonymous to go to his cage was because he made a really bad joke. red Ryder had just told us about his brother being killed in war, and anon asked if he’d donated …because of the topic on the thread….as a joke.
Oh well, I guess its past the fact now.
MODERATOR:
An error was introduced into the formatting instructions for embedding a link:
The double-quote marks (“) enclosing the URL were replaced with single-quotes (‘), making it non-functional (at least on Safari 5.1.10 running on OSX 10.6.8).
Fortunately, the (cutting edge real-time!) preview function allowed me to catch this error and correct it. ;-)
Thanks for the hint. It has been corrected.
Done! Thanks, Gevorg. The site looks really great, and the extra functionality is impressive!
Saker, I absolutely agree with your observations about Blogger versus WordPress. I started a blog on Blogger in 2005 and decided to switch to WordPress in 2008, largely because I wanted a Web site and not just a blog, and I couldn’t afford to hire a developer to build a site. I was totally intimidated by switching over — so many features, and I had to go into the code to change fonts, colors, etc. Once I started getting comfortable, it felt like moving from a tiny apartment into a huge new house, with spacious rooms for each activity and big, organized closets! Plus I got to choose the color of the paint and carpets. Better still, when I redesigned the site in 2010 and 2014, all of my “stuff” moved over instantly, with minimal “unpacking” required.
The one big issue I had — and it was a biggie — was that the theme I chose was not updated, and it became vulnerable to hacking. I did not get the theme from WordPress.org but bought it from a popular developer site. Rather than updating the theme, the developers created new ones, I guess because they wanted you to buy new ones and not keep using the old one. Last year, I started getting notices from my hosting service that I was going over my allotted resource usage. It made no sense to me, because my site was very small, and traffic had pretty much remained constant. It turned out that my site was under a massive hacking attack. They didn’t get in, but my anti-hacking plug-ins were working overtime and using up resources. The log showed that a lot of it was coming from servers in Russia and China. I worked with support to try to fix it, but after a couple of months and a lot of frustrating back and forth, they said the problem likely was occurring because the theme hadn’t been updated. They also said that a lot of hacking is done through plug-ins.
I am sure Gevorg knows all of this, but I’m just sharing my experience from one “non-techie” blogger to another. I wish I could have afforded my own Gevorg. Alas, I was on my own. I managed to find a solution that worked for me, and it all ended well. But man, was it a pain in the a$$ for a few months.
Anyway, thanks for all you do. I will donate more when I am able.
Gevorg, I will donate later … can’t right now. But I will.
thanks…
I got this message from Paypal [after signing in];
“PayPal does not currently support Donation Payments from buyers in JP. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.”
that one’s over my head.
Dear The Saker,
Funnily enough RT is showing a show today discussing the “Wests” coverage of Russia. Russian Insider is getting a lot of coverage as Charles and Alexander are on the show along with Ben Aris:
http://rt.com/shows/crosstalk/239569-russia-putin-intense-biases/
A good way to get some publicity for Russian Insider :).
Rgds,
Veritas