Dear friends,
Today I am posting the “Fall 2016 State of the Saker Community” report and fund drive to inform you and to encourage you to support my work. To say that I need your support is an understatement so, please, help me to continue providing you this unique space of information and discussion.
First, the good news:
The main news to report today is that the blog is doing very well and has been doing so for a long while already. While current events do impact how many people visit the blog on a daily basis, the overall figures are excellent and stable. See for yourself on the following graphs created by my webmaster on the basis of our logs:
Raw numbers, however, even when they are good, do not tell the full story. One special source of joy for me is the high quality of the discussions taking place in the comments section. Nothing is perfect and there is always room for improvement, but I have to say that I am extremely grateful to the moderators who have succeeded in preventing trolls, provocateurs and even plainly stupid people from hijacking the comments section. As a rule, discussions here are interesting and most informative. My special thanks to all those who regularly contribute to the high quality of this blog!
Finally, I am also happy to report that articles from the Saker blog are regularly featured in other publications and even in various books, recently in the USA (Orlando False Flag) and in Sweden (Tankar Om det Otänkbara).
Bottom line: we are most definitely making a difference.
Next, I am working on a very ambitious project to expand the blog into a new section dealing with the history of the Orthodox people and their relations with other faiths. The main goal of this section will be to present the historical truth about crucial events in the history of the Orthodox people and to provide key historical documents on this topic to the English speaking public. This is a long term project which will require a new technical solution to incorporate it into the current blog. The good news is that I have the agreement and support of all the individuals needed for this endeavor.
One more thing. I am extremely happy with the very high quality of the contributions which guest speakers make to this blog. I don’t just mean Pepe Escobar, who is a star in his own right, but also the other regular contributors here who are true experts in their field. I get so many submissions that I have had to make a special “submission guidelines” page which I invite you to check out here:
http://10.16.86.131/submissions-policy/
Now, the not so good news:
First not so great news – the Romanian Saker blog project is a complete faceplant. The person who wanted to start it simply disappeared. Not a big deal, but a disappointing nonetheless. Oh well, that kind of stuff comes with the territory I suppose…
Now the really bad news: donations are down. Like really, really down. Badly.
Except to a rather small faithful core of vital contributors without whom I could never maintain this blog (thanks guys!!), the vast majority of the readers do not, alas, appreciate the time and effort put into this blog. Neither do they seem to realize that I do not use a pay-wall, harass readers with obnoxious pop-ups, populate the front page with paid advertisements or threaten everybody with apocalyptic warnings that I am about to close the blog down due to a lack of support :-)
To those of you who might think otherwise, let me clarify this: I am not, to my great regret, a “paid Putin agent” (even though I am often accused of being one). In fact, I get no money from Russia at all (although recently I did get one donation, but that was the exception). So those who think that the Kremlin, Gazprom or Rosoboronexport support my work are quite mistaken: over 90% of my donations come from the USA and the remaining 10% from all over the world (and, no, if you wonder, nothing from Iran, Syria or Lebanon either). When I think that just one average “korporativ” (corporate party) of an average Russian corporation could pay for several years of my work on this blog I get very, very depressed.
We all sometimes need help!
As I have said in the past, there is a world war already taking place between the Empire and Russia and it is roughly 80% informational, 15% economic and 5% military. I fight in the informational part, but for that I vitally need ammunitions in the form of your financial support. So here is the deal: send me the ammo, and I will fight. But please do send me the ammo. If you don’t, you limit my ability to fight (yeah, I will still fight, even without ammo).
Let me give you a practical example:
Right now my “travel budget” is exactly zero. This year I had to turn down several invitations to participate in various conferences and, even more frustratingly, to meet some rather important people. In one case, I was literally “rescued” by one very generous member of our community who paid for my travel costs to meet with a person I will co-author a book next year (sorry, no names at this point). But that was the exception. For the rest, my travel budget is still zero and it is hard for me to convey how frustrating that kind of “lack of ammo” issue can be (especially when I think of the Empire, Soros & Co. financing their “info-soldiers” with millions of dollars).
So, friend, please, pitch in, take that worry away from me, make me a birthday present (Nov 20) or invest in the future of our planet – whatever your motivation – and send me a tangible sign of your support for my blog. I can do a lot by myself, but for this I really need your help (there are plenty of options including wires, checks, Amazon gif cards, Bitcoin, cash in snail mail and PayPal)
Thank you!
The Saker
PS: Should God ever send me just one philanthropist/benefactor who would pay me a modest but decent salary to work on this blog I promise not to ever post another appeal for donations.
I rarely comment, Saker, but I do read and appreciate everything on this site. My thanks to the various, very interesting authors and commenters and Happy Birthday to you. I can’t think of a better place to support with a donation.
OT but if you search for clinton on Google the first page gives you (https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton) the official Hilary Clinton Twitter account in a widget.
Searching for trump gives you a widget (that had disappeared but is now back). This widget does not any longer point to the official trump twitter tweets but instead is just a search for the word trump:
https://twitter.com/search/trump
These tweets are invariably negative to Trump.
This is Google interfering in the election process. When half of America supports Trump but every link at the top of a search for trump is negative including the news and now the strange change in the twitter widget tweets are negative as well.
While a seach for clinton shows her official twitter and every news article is positive or her attacking Trump.
Zerohedge had a post showing much more unbiased search results from Duck Duck go and other search engines. I almost use use Google anymore. They have morphed from “do no evil” to “we work for the NSA”
NSA:
The Utah Data Center is a 1.2 million square foot enclosure sitting on close to 250 acres of sagebrush. But what does it do?
The Utah Data Center can “store data at the rate of 20 terabytes—the equivalent of the Library of Congress—per minute”
At a moment when the public was being made aware of the scope of the agency’s surveillance programs, designed to “intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications”.
The archive of documents about various NSA operations detailed the center’s Big Data collection activities: the lives of Americans (and beyond) were being recorded and collected onto stacks upon stacks of servers, connected to computers capable of rapid and complex calculations. Despite these important discoveries, and consequences that expand to a global scale, not enough attention has been paid to the location of the center and the material–environmental consequences of their operations.
Focus seems to remain on government responsibility and complicity, and the privacy implications of wide-scale surveillance by various companies such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Skype, and Apple.
As users, we are increasingly involved and complicit with generating Big Data: for social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), through algorithmic queries (OKCupid, Google Search, etc.), for the quantified self (FitBit, Nike Run, etc.), and for geolocation (Google Maps, Yelp, etc.), and so on. These become part of the upward streams collected and mined by the NSA, in addition to metadata, text messages, Skype calls, drone signals, and so on.
It remains unclear why the NSA’s main storage site—of boring architecture, presumably designed to be anonymous—is located where it is, as a base on an unmarked road off of Camp Williams Road, a highway outside Salt Lake City.
Hi Wayne,
Duck go is just as bad. Searching for trump gives a whole bunch of negative Trump articles. Searching for clinton gives a whole bunch of postive Clinton articles.
Back to Google it seems as if searching for trump now gives some pro Trump news (Actually it is now back to all negative) and his official twitter widget.
However searching for ‘trump twitter’ or ‘twitter trump’ the original problem remains. No official Trump twitter widget.
Searching for ‘clinton twitter’ or ‘twitter clinton’ does give an offical Clinton widget.
I have made many comments as written long enough postings that made me hope someone would comment back. Not once. Course I almost was killed last year, and has taken half a year to heal back to almost normal.Then was accepted for a Dutch pension as just hit, proudly, 80 yrs, except the bank managing this decided to punish me for helping my remaining son get two life threatening operations in California where to get an expensive, life threatening operation done with health insurance, say two $6,000 operations you have to find two, three thousand dollar deposits before US health care kicks in!
Obama care being a bad joke…too.And that bank stole over 800 euros from my beginning pension last year too.. Forcing me to hire a free Government paid lawyer to have the NL bank return the pension they stole “as punishment” for helping a grown son stay alive. Without my help, he would not have survived as he would have not been able to get one operation done, much less two…Then the US is throwing stuff at me that makes living here truly awful in ways only the CIA will do. So, my ability to save that would be easy to do with a stable income, such as sending in a monthly amount will have to wait until January when I can send a regular stipend each month..Why are none of my comments posted so others post back to me, or are each one too awful? Maybe I d0 not know where to look?
About the history of the Orthodox faith, I find that a marvelous topic! I became Greek Orthodox in Boston just months after becoming Muslim, weeks before 9/11, in Boston. The 9/11 was so clearly an government set up, frothing at the mouth anti-muslim propaganda, I decided to accept an invitation to be safe and become Greek Orthodox. Once here in Amsterdam I reverted to Islam having considered it for almost 25 years…but find now the amount of hate the US has injected into formal Islam has made it too easy for an enraged Wahabbi Muslim to stick a shiv in me, or an out of work war refugee to do the same, I began attending the Russia Orthodox Church in Amsterdam last week again.I need to find asylum in Russia as all Europe is an US playing field to purely just manipulate at will…with no law. And, no real future, even though Russia ia winning Syria back..Since my pension is only mine if I live in NL, I could apply to an Orthodox convent in Russia. Just have to learn the language. Thoughts? Comments? Thanks for what you do! Especially now. Suzanne
If you’d like to do that it sounds good. Though if you did move ,from what you said,you might lose the pension. I do think though from what you’ve written.That first you might want to truly decide which faith you believe in.I have respect for people’s beliefs in whichever faith they think suits their ideas.But Islam and Christianity are really different in many ways. And if its easy for you to move from one to the other,several times. It may be you haven’t yet decided where your beliefs lay.So maybe that should be the first thing to think about.
Here’s a bit about rape in the Jewish bible http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/rape-in-jewish-bible.html – you have some respect in those beliefs too?
Religion is as bonkers as the nuts who dreamt it up.
Have you tried crowdfunding? Too bad my wife’s inheritance got “taken” (as per the link I gave you) or we’d be in a better position to help.
Thanks for all you do, Saker. Sent along a small amount, wish I could do more, but if a decent percentage of your very strong readership would do the same, life would be much easier I’m sure. And without causing pain for all involved.
Tom in AZ
Saker, I think you should put up a paywall. The model I’m thinking of is corbettreport.com. The idea is to segretate some of your material–not all or even most–just a select amount behind a subscription of a measly $2 per month. Everyone can afford this. There will still be more generous and/or able people who will support you with more, and they are necessary. But about a thousand or so subscribers would really help.
Anyway, that’s my 2 centavos.
Good idea. Also it would be good to allow for single donations. I am a pensioner and will help out when I can. I do value your blog so much.
YES! Saker – what JamesCorbett (of The Corbett Report has done is a VERY good idea. It works so well and makes life MUCH easier all round. Why not make the fee $2.00 per month. Let’s try it anyway. I forget to donate but if it is an automatic payment each month it is painlesss especially at just such a small amount. When you have to remember AND worry about much you can afford it becomes a big painful thing.
I just wish there was another way than through Paypal ?
I am looking forward so much to your writing on the Orthodox Church history. As it is I do listen to Raphael Johnson and LOVE to hear such history about Russia.
Dear Saker, this blog has had a strong influence on my own conversion to Orthodoxy. I just wanted to say that when I opened up this post I was hoping you would announce a more religious side to this blog because navigating the modern multi-religious world, and the dying secular sphere, has been very confusing for me in recent weeks and I’d appreciate your insight. I’m very happy that this is exactly what you’re planning.
On the subject of donations, have you considered a monthly subscription system using Patreon? It also allows you to write subscriber-only updates for some while releasing other posts for everyone. I currently support another pro-Russia project using Patreon and I’m very pleased with its system.
A paywall is, unfortunately, a very bad idea in the context of an informational war. Whether you like it or not, putting up such a wall would massively cut the people who view the information and probably marginalise the site altogether.
The whole point is to get the information out to as many people as possible. This aim is incompatible with a paywall.
I would prefer to see 1 or 2 judiciously placed adverts on the home page.
And more people should make small donations.
It hasn’t affected Corbett’s very large readership. Go to his site and see. By far, most of the content is free. For instance, Saker writes an article for Unz–that sort of thing could be behind the wall, leaving the rest free. Frankly, people who won’t even contribute $2 a month don’t deserve the site or the content.
Ads are not a good idea at all. Totally changes the character of the site.
Hi Saker, i am just a reader. Regarding travel budget. I think it would be nice if you put up a special donation tab somewhere on page where you will write where & why you will go, if you get this money (and what we can get afterwards :) If you won`t get enough, you can then use those money for general purpose. just my 2 cents.
Dear The Saker,
I regularly read Russia Insider……and this site receives about 1.5 to 2 million readers monthly. They have a few advertisements, but they are not distracting at all due to the fact it is not over-loaded with these advertisements. So I suggest you think about advertisements.
The nice thing about ads, is that you control which kind of adds you would like to add.
Other options are:
– to sell merchandise, like T-shirts, uh I mean “The Saker T-shirts” of course, etc.
– Affiliate sales….This is a method where you add links to websites where people can purchase items. You would have to look into which websites offer such options.
– Have you thought about free lance writing and editing for a fee on topics you are a specialist in ?
– If you are multi-lingual, there is also proof-reading and translating options
Keep up the good work !! ….Remember, you are not only a source of information, but a door to opening the minds of millions around the world (the first tipping domino for some).
if only one of our readers could find a fundraiser to approach various peoples-organisations to see if sponsor the website…..or does Saker wish to remain independant ?????
Thanks again Saker and mods for all the marvellous work you do.
Dear Saker,
I read most of your posts on daily basis, and since I’m from Serbia, interest for your blog is obvious in this part of the world. Not to mention our entire media space is western-owned and controlled, with little chance to break strict censorship when trying to get in some kind of debate in some of biggest media here.
Now, a word or two about donations. We, the Orthodox Serbs, are accustomed on modest way of life, but when we believe in something, we will gladly stay hungry to help even some stranger as much as we can at the moment. But, I spoke to many friends of mine who visit regularly and like your blog very much (like me) and the main reason they don’t donate is the fear of tracking their (our) financial transactions and eventually got in some kind of trouble since many of foreign intelligence agencies are very active here in Balkans (they have unlimited access to everything), and we witnessed in past some really crazy stuff happened here to people supporting fighters against NWO.
My question is: is there a enough safe option to make donations and not end up on their radar and become their person of interest?
We wish you all the best and we want to thank you sincerely for your hard work. You are Cyril and Methodius of 21st century. Cheers man…
I would suggest using the bitcoin donation. Bitcoin is totally anonymous and untrackable. Here are two links
http://bitcoinsimplified.org/learn-more/anonymity/
and a 2nd
http://www.coindesk.com/anonymous-bitcoin-backgrounder-policymakers/
its somewhat of a challenge to obtain bitcoins (took me 1 week to understand) but i found a bitcoin atm , i’m in california, i provided it the bitcoin address (that that we show on the site) and gave it dollars… bitcoins were sent to the saker’s site. Completely anonymous , unless a camera was present and took my photo. …. dollars in … bitcoins out …no id required. … mod-hs
We’ll try our best to make it happen since this what you’re all doing is priceless. Thanks for the tip!
I regularly read this Blog. Sites like this are essential to combating the Anglo centric imperialist mass media. However as someone who lived in Russia, on these western based pro-russian sites, there is a tendency to overestimate the influence of Orthodoxy in the Putin-Eurasianist political project.
Modern Russian culture and its geopolitical actions owe much more to postwar Soviet Communism than Orthodoxy. It partly the corruption and failures of the Church which led to the fertile ground for the Bolsheviks to exploit. Most Russians are much less religiously- influenced than those in Protestant countries- americans see the world in good vs evil, all or nothing, even if they are not actively protestant, the mentality persists. With Pro Russia westerners, they often just change the sides around.
Done!
Following Saker’s call, I just sent a $50 donation by paypal 2 days ago. I dislike paywall very much, even as small as $2 per month: the fees to the intermediaries would be greater than the $2 payment. A paywall would cut the number of readers drastically in my opinion: there are millions of blogs and several that are interesting; it is already impossible to read regularly all the interesting blogs, so those that impose a fee will get cut off from the readers.
I believe Saker could make a modest appeal for donation once a year. I would be ready to sent a $50 a year to Saker like I do to a few very intelligent and interesting blogs already. But no paywall.
Done and stay safe
Dear Saker,
there is something wrong with the German Site since yesterday. Is ist really down?
Salud
Carlo
The German site has a system problem which has yet not been fully identified. It will be down until its problem is identified and resolved. ….. mod-h
thanks saker for stopping your german daughter. it was taken over by very questionable members of the german parlament. but you know yourself better, i guess.
keep going and god bless
@meme
Sarc. on: Yes, and the representatives are operating from “Neuschwabenland” in the Antarctic. Sarc. off.
The “mod-h” told us there is only a technical problem… You can find the post direct above yours.