July 18, 2021

I Can’t Stop Staring at This Siberian Mosquito Tornado

Take a look, if you dare:

Exceptionally heavy rains, the kind that are sometimes linked to human-created climate change, can create new wet areas where mosquitos lay eggs and bring about frightening swarms after hatching. But according to the Twitter account of the Siberian Times, a highly followable English-language content creator from Russia’s far east, what you’re seeing here—roughly 1 gazillion male insects circling and looking for females—is typical Siberian summer fare.

And while I’m no entomologist, the size of the swarm suggests these bugs have a long, successful record of finding and mating with each other.

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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.

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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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