Dear friends,

My assistant Amarynth has just posted our September appeal for donations.  What I want to do here is to convey to you some of the reasons for this appeal.

The main reason for this appeal is that the Saker blog has no other sources of revenue.  As mentioned by Amarynth, the Saker blog has no paywalls, no pop-up windows, no advertisements of any kind.  In the Saker community, every reader is treated the exact same way as everybody else, whether that reader is a major donor or somebody who never donated even a single penny.  But there is more to this:

I get offers for paid for articles, for ads, for links exchanges, etc. on a daily basis.  I have always turned all of them down for a very simple reason: I don’t want to compromise the ethos of this blog even in a minor way, even if it costs me a lot of money in lost income.

Next, I have to tell you that our IT infrastructure is costly.  I cannot go into the details, for obvious reasons, but let’s just say that our Chief of IT has put a lot of thought in making our IT deployment highly redundant.  Ask anybody in computers what that means, and you will always get the same reply “serious financial investment” in owned and rented hardware.  Considering the full-spectrum crackdown by the major US IT companies (Google, Facebook, YouTube, etc.) against those who disagree with their Neocon, globalist, agenda, the financing of our IT infrastructure is more important now than ever.  Please help us pay for it now, and then, when the proverbial bovine excreta hits the fan, the Saker blog will still be up (or back up in a short time).

Finally, and Amarynth has already mentioned this, please note that the Saker blog only posts original texts all written specially for the Saker blog.  Take a look at the list of guests analyses and the many topics they cover.  Now let me ask you a simple question: is there anywhere else on the Internet where you could find such a TRULY diverse group authors, many (most?) of them writing from directly from the countries discussed (where else do you find original articles written in, for example, Iran?)  Where else can you find an article written by a paleo-con and a Communist on the same page, or an article about Islam next to an article about Orthodoxy?

Attracting such diverse (and superb!) authors is almost a full-time job by itself.  Yet this is not one I get paid for even if this type of behind-the-scenes work is crucial for the quality of the blog.  Compare that with other outlets who have maybe one or two staff authors and who simply search the Internet for articles and re-post them as if they have been written by, or for, them.  Look, I don’t have any problems with what are basic news aggregation websites, some of them are pretty good, but I want you all to be aware of what makes the Saker blog different and what implies infinitely more time and effort than just simple re-posting.

Finally, as you know I live in the USA and here we are really bracing for the inevitable chaos which will happen in November.  Frankly, between the civil unrest (often violent), the pandemic and the economic collapse, I foresee very, very tough times for me and my family.  We are trying to prepare as best we can, but this is both very time consuming and, what else, rather costly.  If you can, now is the time to help me.

That is all I wanted to add.  Now it is your time to act.

Thank you all, hugs and cheers

The Saker