Dear friends,

All in all 2016 has been an excellent year for our community and we are entering 2017 with a great deal of hope, not only because 2017 could truly be a historical year, but also because in spite of some difficult moments (such as the hijacking and subsequent de-recognition of the German Saker blog) our community is doing exceptionally well: we are involved in all the levels of the struggle against the Empire, we are collaborating with many good people outside our community, and our work is widely circulated and often quoted on the Internet.  As for those who tried to harm us, they completely failed and then subsequently basically disappeared into oblivion.  As the French say, les chiens aboient, la caravane passe.

We made some major changes into our IT architecture.  I don’t want to go into the details, for obvious security reasons, but I will just say that we have made our servers much more redundant.  Even better, we have also made the blog much faster (did you notice?).  We expect to make even more progress in that direction.  All of this work is entirely due to the absolutely fantastic work of Herb, our webmaster, whose efforts, kindness, patience and generosity cannot be overstated.  He is a rather modest and low-key person, but I think that he really deserves to be call the hero of our community as I can tell you for sure that without his work I could never, ever have made our machines run as smoothly as they do now.  Herb – THANK YOU!!!

The other big news is that we are making progress on the “History of the Orthodox Peoples” project.  A large tea of researchers has been assembled and we hope to make an official announcement about the start of our project on February 1st of this year, in just a couple of weeks.  I think that you will be very impressed with what we have developed.  You need to be patient just a little longer to get all the details :-)

Okay, now the money issue.  To be honest, the end of the year has been rather calamitous for me and I am barely making ends meet again.  The bank account is as low as it ever was.  Furthermore, the fact that we got more and better hardware for our computers means that the monthly bills for our servers have gone up.

Alas, while my costs have gone up, our readership increased, donations are down.

As I always do when asking for support, I want to draw your attention to two unique features of this blog:

a) This is not a news-aggregator as most other blogs/websites out there.  While I do have specific agreements with specific authors (Alexander Mercouris, Pepe Escobar) to repost their analyses on the blog, the vast majority of the very high quality guest posts you read here are original analyses, not reposts.  The only “reposts” of sorts which we do here are in the “speeches and statements”, “interviews”, “war news” and “watch list” sections which are specifically designed for that purpose.  But the main analytical sections (“Analyses” and “Guest Posts”) are all original, as are the SITREPS.

b) I have no obnoxious pop-ups, no paywalls and, above all, no advertisements.  Not only that, but I provide all the original contents of this blog under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 4.0 International license (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0).  Compare that with those who copyright everything and threaten you with lawsuits if you reproduce anything they post!

So, original and high-quality contents given to everybody absolutely for free.

Frankly, just look at what I have posted since the beginning of the week and ask yourself if you could find that quality of analysis elsewhere, and completely for free?!

You can see why, in turn, I completely depend on your support and generosity.

So please help, make it possible for me to spend more time working for the blog and resisting the Empire than on my “regular” job.  Your support is the “ammo” that I need to go into “battle”!

Please help!

Thanks in advance, kind regards,

The Saker