Friday Cat Blogging – 18 May 2018

We got our patio cover painted a couple of days ago, so I figured today’s catblogging should be a picture of Hilbert frolicking on the newly painted wood. Naturally he didn’t take the hint on his own, so I picked him up and deposited him up there. He loves prowling around on the patio cover, so he immediately started investigating things.

I took lots of pictures, but unfortunately I wasn’t really paying attention to the shutter speed, which was much too low. Pretty much everything was just a blur of Hilbert flopping and rolling and sticking his nose through the slats. So this morning I hauled him up again. The bad news is that he just roamed around on the roof and then got bored and came down. The good news is that I happened to get this one terrific shot of him. You’ll just have to take my word that he’s posing on a freshly-painted patio cover.

POSTSCRIPT: Hilbert will not be on our new team of disinformation killers. He was willing to work cheap, but we eventually disqualified him for his inability to understand that “disinformation” did not apply to dog food commercials. However, if you’d like to make a donation to help pay the human members of our team, click here.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist 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 need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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