No Joking Please, We’re British

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On Friday I twittered:

If my browsing speed doesn’t improve soon, I’m going to fly a plane into the internet. Don’t pretend you weren’t warned.

Just joking! But a reader emails me a warning that if you live in Britain, you’d better be careful with stuff like this. Paul Chambers was arrested last month for twittering a not dissimilar joke:

Yesterday, the court heard that the message read: “Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!”

Rob Desira, prosecuting, told the court: “The message was posted on the Twitter social networking site. He admitted posting the message into the public domain but never intended the message to be received by the airport or for them to take it seriously.”

….After his arrest, Chambers was suspended from work pending an internal investigation. Detectives also confiscated his iPhone, laptop and home computer….”I would never have thought, in a thousand years, that any of this would have happened because of a Twitter post. I’m the most mild-mannered guy you could imagine.”

OK, maybe it was a dumb thing to do. But arrested, suspended from work, laptop and phone confiscated, and now facing possible jail time? Come on.

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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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