March 16, 2015

12 Great Government GIFs

You may not be able to stop looking at these taxpayer-funded GIFs.


Spend enough time browsing government websites and you’re sure to come across a GIF*. Not the bite-sized pop-culture kind, but low-res relics of the days when a GIF was a way to spice up a Web 1.0 site without slowing down Netscape users’ dial-up connections. Here are a dozen taxpayer-funded GIFs you may not be able to stop looking at:

 

Stinky toxic sludge

EPA

Ronald Reagan meets a turkey

National Archives

This winking, whisker-wagging feline

CDC

This adorably suicidal moon meteor

NASA

This rabid raccoon

CDC

The touch-typing Data Ferrett!

US Census (sadly now defunct)

The Wright Flier

NASA

These menacingly mesmerizing neuroreceptors

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

This low-res lava lamp

NIH

Small man with small change

EPA

This guy riding a space probe

NASA

Citizens demanding more GIFs!

EPA

*It’s pronounced with a hard G, like government.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

payment methods

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