Dear friends,

While I did not reply to any comments, I have read them very carefully.  I have also received a lot of emails and, again, I read all of them very carefully.  I also consulted with my family, a few very trusted friends and advisors and I have prayed for God to allow me to discern His will and I have taken the following decisions:

First, I will shut down the blog no later than at the end of February.

Second, for a host of reasons, I cannot transfer the blog to any one person or group of trusted people.  This sounds like a great idea until you look at tons of details and it becomes an impossible one.

Third, yes, I would like to keep the entire archive of the blog available somewhere on the Internet.

However,

I do not want to maintain any association with either the archive itself or the people who would be hosting it.  Simply put, I don’t want to be involved in maintaining it.

Finally, I will keep paying and owning the domain name  thesaker.is but this will be the only financial commitment I am willing to make.  However, I am willing to point this domain name to any IP address hosting the archive of the blog should one be made available (that would be my only personal involvement in the maintenance of this archive).

These are my main conclusions and decisions so far.

Now a few points and questions to all of you, my dear Saker community:

First, while I don’t have the energy to seek out a possible archive, I am open to suggestions.  Ideally, I would prefer an archive with the following characteristics:

  • It would be preferable to have it hosted on servers located in Zone B (outside the Empire)
  • It would be preferable if the blog’s archive could be hosted by groups/entity/corporation/etc. with some disposable money (as opposed to a single well-intentioned individual).  Simply put: hosting a large archive on a server and maintaining it requires both 1) skilled personnel and 2) money to pay for the costs.

If anybody reading these words has any suggestions or wants to offer to host the archive, please contact me at either vineyardsaker@gmail.com (preferred) or TheSaker@protonmail.ch (backup if needed).

By the way, I will keep these two emails even after I close down the blog, so if you need to contact me, you will have these two emails as options.

Next, the issue of my guest authors:

  1. I will still post some articles until the final shutdown at the end of February, however, I will only post articles by former contributors giving them a last chance to share something with the rest of us (my apologies to new authors!!!)
  2. I am thinking about one possible solution for our guest authors, but I won’t mention it until I have all the facts aligned and it seems viable to me.  Please give me some time to sort through a few options :-)

Finally,

I will not write any analyses of the current events.  However, I will do two things:

  1. I will keep you all informed by posting updates here.
  2. I will make a few more personal posts in which I will share with you some things I feel like addressing before shutting down the blog forever (at least until some semblance of sanity has returned to our poor planet, and I am not holding my breath…).  I also have a few messages I want to direct to some specific groups and that will be the chance for me to do so.  In fact, there are a few things I never addressed on the blog which I want to address before bowing out and leaving the stage.

That’s it for me now.

Well, one more request: please post as many comments as you want, but please only email me if your email is related to the shutdown of the blog (I am swamped with emails and they take a lot of time to read, nevermind reply to).

And, I almost forgot:  IF you are interested in this, I would be willing to record one video replying to any questions you might have about geopolitics, the war, music and even personal questions.  I would, of course, choose the questions and only reply to those which I find appropriate, but that would be something I could do during the next few weeks if there is an interest in it.  So, if you are interested, please do EMAIL me (do not ask in the comments section please) and please make SURE to include “Q&A with Andrei” in the subject line of your email.

Okay, now I think I am done on my side.

Your turn: thoughts/suggestions/complaints?

Hugs and cheers

Andrei