The End of Days is Here

[Update: As you can see from the "meter" below, the fundraiser has reached its goal, thanks to 62 donors, including one whom I'm not sure I have permission to name, but who came in with a $1,500 contribution today, and all of whom have my sincere thanks. The "meter" lists 63 donors, but I'm not thanking that last one, because it's me, "re-donating" $100 of my December pay as promised - KN@PPSTER]

As in "the end of days in the Center for a Stateless Society's Q1 Fundraiser," it being the last day of Q1 and all.



By way of springing good news on people when I'm asking them for money, C4SS just reached 200 "mainstream media reprints" of our articles (in 21 countries on five continents!), 10 months into our efforts toward that end, and a couple of months ahead of my prediction for that milestone.

Is that number "soft?" I suppose so, but the softness goes two ways. The "mainstream medianess" of some of the pickups/citations is open to reasonable question, but it's also a very good bet that I've missed reprints in smaller papers that don't run everything in their Google-indexed online editions (occasionally I catch one of these in a PDF long after the fact).

Why is that number indicative of C4SS's worthiness of support? As I mentioned late in 2010, I received a fundraising letter from another freedom movement institution -- one that I respect very much and don't care to name -- citing the fact that they'd managed to get 500 of their op-eds into newspapers ... since 1988! So it seems to me that if you're interested in supporting pro-freedom newspaper penetration projects, C4SS is a lot of bang for very little buck (I'll let you do your own comparisons of C4SS's budget to those of other organizations, but suffice it to say that the money that funds us for months would fund some of those orgs for minutes).

And speaking of bang for buck, C4SS's fundraising model is rear- rather than forward-facing. We do our work "on spec," and hope you'll find what we've already done worth paying for, instead of asking you to buy the proverbial pig in a poke. If I'm not mistaken, most C4SS personnel (myself included) are hopefully awaiting payment for work done in December 2010.

My intent, as per usual practice, is to re-donate $50 from my next semi-monthly ($320), or $100 from my next monthly ($640), C4SS "paycheck." I much appreciate anything that KN@PPSTER's readers might care to do by way of pre-emptively matching that today.