Dear friends,

Thank you so much for your response to my appeal!  You have responded in large numbers and many of you have send generous donations for which I am immensely grateful.  Also, I have been contacted by a lawyer who has agreed to help me.  So, yet again, the community has made a miracle happen.  I am both amazed and most grateful.

One more thing: since this appeal was so successful, I have decided to limit my fundraisers to one in the winter and one in the summer.  And that’s it.  Hopefully, this will be better for me and for you.  What do you think – agreed?

About the blog: in order to balance the ‘weight’ of articles on the main page, we (my Webmaster, Herb, my Director of Research, Scott, and myself) have decided to only keep “heavy” (such as guest posts or analyses) articles in the “latest articles” menu on top of the page and place the “lighter” ones (such as watch list or my sandbox) in a separate, thinner, menu bar.  The main reason for that is simple:

Some items we now feature every day (such as the SouthFront reports) and I don’t need to inform you that yes, indeed, we also got them today.  Other items are really not that important, such as my Sandbox, Scott’s corner or the Open Thread Café.  However, and I hope that you have noticed that, we are now featuring extremely high quality and original contribution from guest authors and we don’t want them to be displaced from the “latest articles” by, say, one of my rants or music videos in my “Sandbox”.

I am very proud to report that we are now receiving a steady flow of such original external contributions which is quite unique: most other websites and blogs either repost materials taken elsewhere or post translations.  Sometimes we do that too (see next paragraph).  But most of what we do is post 100% original materials and that makes this blog quite unique, I think.

The sole exception to that is my agreement with the Alexander Mercouris at Russia Insider and Patrice Greanville at the Greenville Post with whom we have made an agreement to exchange materials: I post theirs and they post mine. And, as you know, I write a weekly column for Ron Unz at the Unz Review which I also publish here.

I have to say that I immensely value my collaboration with these good friends. This is also how I feel about SouthFront whose work I find of absolutely superb quality!

One last thing: between my full-time regular job (my wife and I run a small mobile veterinary practice which means that I spend many hours every day on the road), my three kids and my work for the blog, I am *totally* over-worked and I have a hard time freeing up even a few minutes to get anything done and I wish my day had 30 or 40 hours, not just a measly 24.  I have even completely stopped writing my thesis (in Patristic theology) to dedicate all me “free” time to the blog (about which I have no regret, by the way, this is a war which is 80% informational, 15% economic and 5% military and I have to do my duty and fight the informational battle).  The part of the blog which has most suffered from this is my participation in the (mostly very interesting) discussions in the comments.  I apologize for that, I really do.  I am aware of that and I will try to show up as much as I can.  Likewise, I will try to hang out at the “Moveable Feast Café” as much as I can (maybe using my smartphone when stuck in traffic).

That’s it for today.  A big thank you to all of you for your support and participation in our community.  We are most definitely making a difference and we are doing that in a unique and original way.  Of that I am most proud of :-)

Kind regards and hugs to all,

The Saker

PS: the blog has been sluggish today.  We are working on it and hopefully this will be fixed soon.