Can You Fear Me Now?

Five products for the cell phone phobic

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Can You Fear Me Now?WaveShield 1000
The Claim: Applying a sticker to your cell phone’s earpiece “may reduce the strength of electromagnetic-field emissions” between 50 to 97 percent.
disconnect: The Federal Trade Commission busted WaveShield’s distributor for not showing any scientific proof; most cell phone radiation comes from the antenna, not the earpiece.

Can You Fear Me Now?Clarins Expertise 3P Screen Mist
The Claim: Spritz your “face, neck and décolleté” with the mist to create a “highly protective veil” that blocks electromagnetic waves.
disconnect: The British Advertising Standards Authority politely calls Clarins’ product research “not robust enough.”

Can You Fear Me Now?QLink Pendant
The Claim: A microchip inside the necklace “picks up sufficient micro currents from your heart to power the pendant…reminding the body of its healthy frequencies.” (Models cost up to $999; there’s also a collar tag for pets.)
disconnect: According to the Guardian, the microchip is just a piece of wire.

Can You Fear Me Now?SafeTShield
The Claim: A small metallic disc stuck on your cell phone “prevents the radiation from penetrating the brain through the ear canal.”
disconnect: The ftc found that SafeTShield (and several products like it) could actually increase the intensity of radiation emissions.

Can You Fear Me Now?Orgone Safespace
The Claim: A “non-electric metal substrate holo-gram” that comes in what looks like a black plastic video-cassette box neutralizes radiation and enhances “the natural dna rewinding process.”
disconnect: Be kind, rewind—your dna?

Practical Values: This Is Your Brain on Cell Phones

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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