Summer Fundraiser 2016, Day One

Well, the Dog Days of summer are here. And that’s the theme of this quarter’s fundraising week: “Dog Days”.

Since this summer’s Dog Days began (I date them from June 12 — more on that later), we have once again acquired a substantial batch of new readers. So I’ll begin by explaining to those recent arrivals what we’re doing, and all the veterans of previous fundraisers can scroll through this part to get to the meat of the post.

When we got kicked out of Pajamas Media back in April 2008 (wow — more than eight years! Time flies), we lost the advertising revenue we used to get from their “skyscrapers” and banner ads. It wasn’t a whole lot of money, but times were tough, so it hurt. Dymphna and I took a poll of our readers and asked them whether they wanted us to scout around for other advertisers (hoping that we could avoid the sleazy ones), or should we raise money through periodic funding appeals, the way NPR affiliates do?

Our readers opted for these fundathons over any further advertising (which was a relief for me; I hated those ads), so we established a routine: Every quarter we pick a week and put up a post each day, beginning on Monday, in which we badger regular readers to drop a tanner or three in the tip cup on our sidebar. Then, on the following Monday — the eighth day — I post a wrap-up that lists all the geographical locations from which the gifts came. Dymphna refers to the entire sequence as the “Fundraiser Octave”.

We’ve been getting by this way, quarter by quarter, for eight years now. It’s the 21st-century version of living hand-to-mouth. In the beginning it was anxiety-inducing, but we’ve gotten used to it now. Somehow we always manage to scrape up just enough to keep going — to pay the website hosting fees and whatnot, with enough left over so Dymphna and I can have our daily crust (along with some fine home-brewed espresso, I might add).

[Full disclosure: We do have some book ads on our sidebar, but those are static images with links that we’ve put up gratis for our friends. The ones that point to Amazon return a small commission for us, so if you click through to buy a book, make sure to order some power tools or a crate of saffron while you’re there.]

Now back to the Dog Days, and why I date them from June 12.

In my Auxiliary Brain (a Microsoft Access database) I keep an indexed archive of images that I’ve uploaded, so I can hunt up graphics that I need with just a few keystrokes. The other day I went looking for a series of images, so I sorted the table in date order and scrolled through it, beginning at the current day and working backwards. Here’s what I noticed:

Before June 12 there had been a fairly lengthy lull in major jihad attacks. For months there hadn’t been any screen-caps from TV news reports or mug shots of perps. No flowers and candles and teddy bears on the spot where infidels had been slaughtered — probably none since Brussels. No photoshops of prominent European leaders with a backdrop of Arabic script or Korans (making those is my favorite pastime). There had been the Austrian election, and all the Brexit material — relatively calm stuff.

Then came the jihad attack at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando on June 12. After that, right up until last week, it was one jihad attack after another, like automatic weapons fire.

Look at this list of images; you can chart the Dog Days by examining the descriptions of the pictures I uploaded:

There have been so many bloody attacks this summer that I’ll bet you’ve forgotten some of them. I know I had, until I looked at the list.

And all this has happened in less than two months:

• The jihad massacre in Orlando
• The killing of the French police officers
• The Istanbul terror attacks by the mujahideen from the ’stans
• The jihad massacre in Dhaka
• The truck jihad in Nice
• The axe attack on the train near Würzburg
• The massacre in Munich
• The machete attack in Reutlingen
• The suicide bomber in Ansbach
• The halal slaughter of the priest in a Normandy church
• The surgeon threatened with beheading in Troisdorf
• The terror mosque in Hildesheim
• The destruction of a church interior in Hamburg by an Afghan jihadi.

This is why I put up the “Number of days without an Islamic terrorist attack” graphic at the top left of the sidebar. If you look through all the news stories on any given day, somewhere in the world Muslims have carried out at least one terror attack. There hasn’t been a single exception since I created that graphic.

This is what the Dog Days of 2016 have meant so far: an acceleration of the pace of the Great Jihad, especially in Europe.

It used to be that Vlad and I would get a break of a week or so between major crises. We’d get a chance to catch our breath, have a couple of nights’ sleep, maybe do something else besides jihad-jihad-jihad for a few hours, and be rested and ready to start again when the mujahideen staged another slaughter.

But not during the Dog Days. Every morning I get up and look at the news headlines with dread. When it’s a particularly deadly attack — like Nice or Munich — I’ll face long hours of skype conversations, live-blogging, editing translations, helping Vlad subtitle videos, processing images, on and on until I’m exhausted. During the middle of July it went on like that every single day.

For the last few days Vlad and I have had a breather — nothing major since the threatened beheading of the surgeon in Germany. But we know it won’t last. The Olympics are starting, for example, and Brazil is awash with mujahideen, both Sunnis and Shi’ites. Covert operatives for the Islamic State are arriving in Europe all the time, disguised as “refugees”. Untold thousands of them are already in Europe, so it’s only a matter of time before a plot goes undetected by the intelligence services. Then BOOM! — the whole ghastly round begins again. There’s a more than 50-50 chance that one will kick off during the middle of this fundraiser.

The dogs of war have been unleashed upon us in these, the Dog Days of 2016.

Speaking of Vlad Tepes: So much crucial video work is done by Vlad that we cut him in for a 10% share of whatever y’all donate here during fundraising week. His videos are indispensable to the Transatlantic Counterjihad; without him we wouldn’t have nearly as much depth and reach. So keep it in mind when you donate that we tithe to Vlad. If you want to give him extra, please visit his site; he’s got his own donate button.

Dymphna will be along tomorrow morning with her own take on these doggy days.

The tip jar in the text above is just for decoration. To donate, click the tin cup (or the donate button) on the sidebar of our main page. If you prefer a monthly subscription, click the “subscribe” button.