Friday Cat Blogging – 3 August 2018

Here’s Hopper, rolling around in the morning sun right after a nice workout with the scratching post. Her right eye looks like the Eye of Sauron from the LOTR movies. I wonder if that’s where they got the idea?

UPDATE: Reader AP emails to say: “Christopher Tolkien recently released Beren and Luthien, which tracks the evolution of one of Middle Earth’s central legends. It’s one of the earliest, chronologically, and I think also the first one in which Sauron appears. It turns out that in the earliest versions Tolkien wrote, the character that eventually became Sauron was Tevildo, Prince of Cats.”

I think that’s appropriate. It’s a good thing we have them all totally tame these days with the evil completely bred out of them, right?

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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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