Dear friends, I am sorry to say that I am sick yet again, this time with some Florida food poisoning. In fact, I am writing this in bed on my tablet. I have a few requests to submit to you: 1) Sobcors: please stop using the sobcor email list as a discussion list. Please ONLY use it to contact your REGION’S sobcors to get in touch and/or coordinate work.2) Please,
Dear friends,Since some of you were worried, I just wanted to let you know that all is well except for my usual problem of being one person doing too many things. The situation in the Ukraine is too fluid to say much right now anyway. I expect to write up an evaluation of the results of the referendum by tomorrow morning.For the rest of today I will try to catch
Dear friends, Two small points: a) I am sick with a nasty stomach flu and I am spending most of my time in bed. I hope to get better by tomorrow. Until then, this affects my ability to reply to emails, moderate comments or write. I apologize for that.b) I have done a poor job enforcing the rule that comments must be respectful. This has to change. So from now
Dear friends,The following comments moderation policy has now been adopted:1. Comments must contribute to the interest of a thread, a post or of the blog. Just venting or totally inane comments will not be allowed.2. Comments must be respectful. Criticisms are welcome, but they must be fact based on logically outlined. Name calling does not qualify.3. Off-topic comments are allowed, but have to offer something of interest to the readers.
Dear friends,I realized that I was missing on a good opportunity here to involve some correspondents from the USA.While I myself currently live in the USA, I think that I might very much need the help from US correspondents, but not from this or that state or region, but from different specializations.While it makes little sense to compare Fox News in San Diego and Boston, the USA can be very
Dear friends,A few days ago I posted an idea to create a network of “Saker correspondents”. Here is what I wrote: I think that it might be extremely useful to create a group of “correspondents” of this blog. Here is what I mean by that:I need local folks to go through the local Internet resources (not the big national news, those I parse myself) to seek out interesting stuff and
Dear friends, I have decided to take the opportunity of a lull in my Sunday afternoon to seek your advice as to what to do about my comments policy.After quite a few years of relative obscurity, this blog has seen a sudden and massive explosion in readership. For years I was getting about 1000 visitors per week, now it regularly gets over 20’000 visitors per day from literally all over
Dear friends,With almost 20’000 readers literally spread all over the world, I have decided to follow a very good suggestion posted by ‘anonymous’ and switch this blog’s timestamps to universal time aka Zulu time aka GMT. Sticking to the one I previously used (EST) is really inadequate and parochial. Also, since most of the world does not use the stupid AM/PM convention, I will be using the so-called “military time”
Dear friends, Today, as people often say, I have some good news and some not so good news.The good news is that a number of kind people have reach out to me in different ways to help me assure the survivability of this blog. The idea is to make the blog available in sufficient number of duplicates located in different places of the planet to prevent the “Axis of Kindness”
Dear friends,After being urged to do so by a lot of you (thanks!), I have backed up this blog on WordPress. You can now find the backup blog here: http://thesaker.wordpress.com/ For the time being, this is only a backup option so PLEASE continue to post your comments here and not on the backup blog. Also, I am, alas, limited to 13MB of blogger import on WordPress. At least the newest
Dear friends,Several of you have expressed your puzzlement and even annoyance at the fact that in one of my recent posts I have quoted the Book of Genesis and I think that it is important for me to speak to this concern.First and foremost, and this is really important to me, I want you to believe me when I say that I honestly understand your point of view. I have
Dear friends,I have a found a few minutes to sit down and update you about donations.So far, 80 people have made donations through PayPal. Even though many of you have had problems due to all sorts of bugs and quirks of PayPal, the money always ended up getting to me. I now also have as a policy to immediately transfer any money I get to my bank account, “just in
After the weird service interruption today, I have decided to take some precautionary emergency measures. Should something really bad suddenly happen to this blog, for whatever reasons, I will continue blogging at the following address:http://thesaker.ucoz.com/blog (please write this down somewhere)also,I cannot imagine having both my blog and my email address shot at the same time but, just in case, I have this backup email address now:vineyardsaker@mail.ru (please write this down
Several of you have reported to me that this blog has been taken off-line. I had no access to it for about 15 minutes. I have just removed links to the movie I mentioned in my previous post to make sure they are not the cause of this. From my end everything appears to be in order now. Can you please confirm to me that this blog is visible to
The bad news is that I am still sick. The good news is that today I had a good laugh. In Saint Petersburg, members of the political party PVO or “Party of Great Russia” (I would describe them as “Stalinist patriots”) have offered the US Consulate a Russian “karavai” (kind of traditional bread given to newly weds and to welcome friends) with the words “thanks to the USA for Crimea”.
Dear friends,I just have to let you know that I am sick with a rather nasty flu so I will not post for a couple of days, nor will I reply to emails or comments. There might also be some delay in my clearing comments but I will try to keep that as short as I can. So – please! – keep the conversations going on any topic you want,
A reader just send me this warning: VS, do you realize that a phishing site is closely imitating your blog’s address? I inadvertently typed in vineyardsaker.blogpot.com (no “s”) rather than vineyardsaker.blogSpot.com and up popped a Christian Zionist website talking about the apocalypse. Do you think that the similarity is intentional??? At first I thought your website was hacked. Then I discovered my mistake. Quick check – he is correct. Some
Dear friends, I am really sorry to have to announce that I fed up with the torrent of ignorant, stupid and racist comments this blog is getting. I honestly tried to do my best not to have to censor these guys, but that only seemed to have exited them further. I simply don’t have enough time to spend one single more minute dealing with this issue. I am not a
With the recent sharp rise of readers of this blog (well over 1’000’000 visits in total and 10’000+ visitors per day) a equally sharp rise of Nazi and other racist troll clearly happened. My policy in the past has been to either crush their sophomoric and ignorant views by posting rebuttals, but now I simply do not have the time to play Kindergarten cop with these obsessive-compulsive Jew haters. And
Dear friends,I have just set up a snail mail address for donations. Please send them to:The Saker41 rue de la SynagogueCH-1204 GenèveSwitzerland For those of you in the USA/Canada – I am still trying to work out something affordable in the USA but in the meantime I hope that you can use the one above. Many thanks and kind regards,The Saker
