Thank you all, for your generosity! I’ll be sending individual thank you notes over the next day or two. Occasionally I’m unable to reach folks who contribute (emails bounce, and so forth) so I want to be certain you all know your support is appreciated.
2026 Website Security Fundraiser
Most of the time, site administration runs smoothly here. I check email alerts, clean out the spam account signups, check the dashboard for failed logins — that sort of thing.
Aaaand then some of the time, it doesn’t. Not at all. That few minutes of morning routine turns into hours, and then days, of back and forth with tech support from multiple providers.
Back in June, SDA began puking up bad connections and resource limit warnings. Our traffic stats crashed and then froze. The hosting company diagnosed “ai bot traffic” and recommended Cloudflare to take the load off the server.
You know about Cloudflare — it’s a big tech expert company that measures your humanity.
So, upon the advice of experts I purchased a Cloudflare plan. This immediately broke the site good and hard.
Dealing with Cloudflare support required a heroic act of restraint on my part when, after days of failed fixes, the ticket was elevated, and a higher level tech arrived to “take over the case”.
I thanked him, before reminding Mr. Al-High Level it had been his case all along and closing the account.
To cut a long and ridiculous story short, our newish hosting company (they inherited SDA when they bought out Hosting Matters) then thought to check our traffic stats.
“Oh”.
They had “inherited” a site that served 5.7M visits and pushed 1.19 TB of bandwidth since January. Well, that was new information! This resulted in a phone meeting with the host company’s owner and tech team, real people, for which I am genuinely grateful.
So, now we have a higher $$ plan. It’s not a heavy lift financially, but it does double the hosting fees we enjoyed for nearly two decades. That, combined with the security plan renewal, means that it’s fundraising time again.
We only do this once a year, and you all contribute far more than required to cover our costs, for which I’m also grateful. As I wrote last year at this time, “The business model of SDA has always been “this blog runs on the volunteer effort of people who enjoy yelling at radios, but your donations are appreciated”.
The funds raised over and above those costs are divided among myself and the guest bloggers. Etransfer is the preferred method, but there’s a link to a Paypal address on the sidebar as well.
*** If you’ve recently donated or contribute monthly, please ignore this – you’ve done your part! If you’re not in a financial position to contribute, please don’t and don’t apologize for it. ***
Finally, a reminder about SDA account creation: If, in the interests of commenting privacy you create a username and/or email address with properties common to spammers, I’m going to nuke it. So, if I’ve deleted your account in error, drop me an email and we’ll get you fixed up.
The Blogfather
InstaPundit turned 25 on Saturday.
Oddments For The Weekend
Including a real-life zombie nightmare; Satie on a bandoneon; a museum of antique tubas; and the pram of the future, circa 1971.
All this and more.
Oh, and should you be inclined to help keep a blog afloat, it’s fundraising week.
Update
Hey everyone, I haven’t been posting for quite awhile so I thought I’d give everyone an update. Continue reading
Blog Notes
I’m back at the desk here, but still have work to do unloading and catching up after a two day drive home from Columbus, OH. Many thanks as usual to my busy guest bloggers who take time out of their own lives to fill in during my absence! I should be back to regular programming tomorrow, (depending on how long it takes to get the kinks out of the display issues affecting some users).
Thanks for your patience!
A Chance To Express Encouragement
It’s fundraising week over at my place.
If you’d like to help keep a blog afloat, and ad-free, by all means do.
SDA Technical Update
Please know that Lance & Kate are aware of the strange appearance of the site when one is not logged in. It will be fixed as soon as possible.
Source Code for the Swedish Digital Id System Has Been Hacked
Pass The Moisturiser
Blog Notes
Despite years of search engine demotion, we’re nicely holding our own. Many thanks, my droogies.
The Year That Was
The Year Reheated, in which he marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters:
In July, we revisited our experiment in multiculturalism and indiscriminate immigration, in which uninvited newcomers have to be reminded that torturing animals and loitering by school gates in order to film children are activities not generally approved of by the indigenous. There followed a menu of other cultural subtleties not being grasped by new arrivals – say, queuing, courtesy and not raping schoolchildren – along with efforts by governments to tactfully convey local customs, while suppressing any noticing of what must not be noticed. Apparently, we must explain civilisation to those unfamiliar with the concept, while pretending that no such corrective measures are required or taking place.
Via the pages of British Vogue, Ms Hanna Flint expressed her dismay that new adaptations of works by Emily Brontë and Jane Austen have “cast the protagonists as white once again.” Ms Flint bemoaned the “factory setting of a white perspective” in tales about white people, and the lack of “historical inclusivity” in adaptations of novels set in rural England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ms Flint informed us that she is “left somewhat cold” by period-appropriate pallor. A train of thought that terminated before arriving at the possibility that others, perhaps some larger number, might be left somewhat cold by modish anachronism and jarring racial contrivance.
We also visited Loughborough University, where senior lecturer Dr Ben Roberts has devised, at taxpayer expense, an unorthodox use for yoghurt – namely, smearing it on windows so as to slightly lower indoor temperatures during that rarest and briefest of phenomena, the British heatwave. Dr Roberts assured those intrigued that, as soon as the yoghurt has dried, “the smell disappears.”
Oh, there’s more.
Tidings
Blog Notes
A note on User Registrations: With the institution of account registration for SDA commentors, one of my daily rituals is deletion of spam account sign ups.
While most of these are blindingly obvious or have been flagged for forum abuse, others are more discrete. When in doubt, my default is to delete. If you are a legitimate reader whose sign up was removed in error, shoot me an email and we’ll get you fixed up.
A word of advice: use your regular email address and complete all of the fields in your account. The more creative you are (throw-away email domains, etc) the more likely your privileges will be denied.
The Internet’s Not Well
It stayed back at the hotel.
Outage comes around a month after Amazon Web Services outage also took much of the internet offline
Good Man Gone
Jim Robinson, the visionary founder of Free Republic and one of the internet’s earliest conservative pioneers, passed away peacefully on Monday, October 27, 2025, in Fresno, California. He was 79. […]
In 1996, from his Fresno home, Robinson launched Free Republic as a small discussion board for conservative viewpoints. What began as a side project quickly grew into a national movement. By early 1997, “Freepers,” as members called themselves, were exchanging ideas, posting news links, and organizing events long before social media made such activism commonplace.
During the Clinton impeachment era, Free Republic became a hub of conservative grassroots energy, proof that ordinary citizens could wield collective influence through the internet.
The Small Matter Of The Bar Tab
Yes, it’s fundraising week over at my place.
If you’d like to help keep a blog afloat, and ad-free, by all means do.
2,000,000
I mentioned a few days ago that we were closing in our 2 millionth comment here at SDA, and then went about my business. But trust Robert – he decided to dig into it over the weekend, and his analysis is good enough for me.
Congrats to “Unknown Jane”, now you’re famous!
Blog Notes
Well done, my droogies. (No, I can’t identify who will write “comment 2M”, so don’t go flooding the posts in hopes of a prize.)
2025 Fundraiser Followup
To our readers and blog authors — your support of SDA has been outstanding through the years, and 2025 is no exception. I spent last evening sending notes to all who contributed, but a handful of those bounced back — so I’m here this morning to thank you all again, and let those whom I may have missed know that we truly appreciate the support.
While I could monetize the site with ads and pop-ups, I prefer the voluntary funding model because it preserves our editorial independence and keeps your reading experience free of that particular annoyance.
As we push well past our 20th year, you can trust that SDA endures because we have something to say – not because we’re working a grift or pushing narratives on behalf of an undisclosed funding source. It’s gratifying to know so many of you appreciate what we do here. Thank you all, as always!