My new, high-speed blogging hub of operations.Kevin Drum

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I guess this is my week for being hoist on my own cynical petard. As promised, I went out and bought a new cable modem yesterday. I didn’t do this because I thought it would make any difference, but because I figured I’d never get any serious help from Cox tech support until I did. So I bought the one that was on sale, plugged it in, allowed Cox to sniff around, and then ran a speed test to get a rough idea of where I was.

And . . . it was running consistently at 4-6x the performance of my old box. And in the last 24 hours, at least, it hasn’t crashed once. So the problem really was my cable modem, just like the Cox guy suggested.

Which is a bit of a mystery. I mean, it’s not like my old cable modem was some kind of relic from 1997. I bought it three years ago, and it’s still a current model—selling for more than the replacement box I bought. So why would it provide such sluggish service? And why would it slowly deteriorate over time to the point where it was crashing three or four times a day?

Beats me. Luckily I have wealth privilege, which means that if I can fix a problem for mere small dollar amounts, it just doesn’t matter. If the new device works and all it cost was $150, I don’t care what the problem was. In with the new, and off to the trash with the old.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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