March 17, 2020

Purell Finally Exposes TSA’s Great 3.4 Ounce Liquid Sham

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Now that nobody wants to fly anyway, TSA has decided that large bottles of fluids and gels aren’t all that dangerous after all:

The Transportation Security Administration will allow travelers to bring larger bottles of hand sanitizer on board with them when they fly, the agency announced Friday — the latest in a series of policy changes tied to the novel coronavirus outbreak. Passengers will now be allowed to travel with containers of liquid hand sanitizer up to 12 ounces.

But wait. If terrorists can make a bomb out of fluids and gels, they can just as readily make it from fluids and gels packed into a bottle marked “Purell.” So if it’s OK to carry 12 ounces of Purell on board a plane, why not 12 ounces of anything else? Does this make sense? Our resident chemist, Cheryl Rofer, explains:

Oh.

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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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