Friday Cat Blogging – 29 December 2017

For our final catblogging post of the year, our local furballs have agreed to give the stage to Tillamook, one of my mother’s cats. I was visiting yesterday because the latest Windows update from Microsoft corrupted her PC so badly it wouldn’t boot. It was a lengthy visit, since I had decided it was time to buy a new computer rather than risk surgery on the old one, which would probably just crash again soon. They’re so cheap, why not? Anyway, the basics are all working now, though I’m sure there will be plenty of fiddly details to attend to over the next few weeks.

Every time I do something like this I wonder how anyone survives having a PC. I’m pretty PC savvy, but even I had to screw around a fair amount to get all the backups and the email archives and the browser profiles etc. etc. working properly. An ordinary person wouldn’t have had a chance.

On the bright side, the printer driver apparently installed itself without my even touching it. If only everything else worked so well.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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