Browsing PBH By Articles

Why Facebook Is The Future Of The Internet & Personal Relationships

Imagine you woke up as Mark Zuckerberg. The Middle East is revolting daily thanks, in part, to a website you cobbled together in your dorm room. Drunk. Time Magazine named you Person of the Year two months ago. Goldman Sachs cut your company a half billion dollar check last month. And the movie about you may well win the Oscar for best picture later this month. You are 26 years old and worth $15 billion.

In spite of the spoils, you live a more or less monastic life. You zip up the hoodie, walk out of the modest home you rent month to month, and cruise to work in the Accura TSX, your lone indulgence. It’s a one minute drive. The office is fratty. Everyone is a “dude”. Many wear flip-flops. And there are unlimited Lucky Charms. You don’t have your own office so you plop down wherever and code on and off for the next 16 hours. When people don’t interrupt you.

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Three Charities That Don’t Deserve Your Money

This is the concluding post of the PBH series Choose Another Charity, comprised of 3 articles on the Salvation Army, MADD, and ChildFund.

Salvation Army [Editor’s note: For a vigorous debate on the Salvation Army, see the comment section of the original article]

Everyone knows the Salvation Army. Whether it’s the secondhand goods at their thrift stores or their collection kettles outside department stores, the Salvation Army is ubiquitous to the holiday season.

However, the Salvation Army’s virulent opposition to gay rights both in public and through persistent legislative lobbying raises the question how donations intended for the needy are being spent. Many people forget that the Salvation Army is in fact an Evangelical church, and as such, it tends to have a hard-right social agenda.

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Fur Coat Revolutionaries (How Humanitarian Assistance Isn’t Humanitarian)

The Article: Alms Dealers: Can you provide humanitarian aid without facilitating conflicts? by Philip Gourevitch, published in October by the New Yorker.

The Text: In Biafra in 1968, a generation of children was starving to death. This was a year after oil-rich Biafra had seceded from Nigeria, and, in return, Nigeria had attacked and laid siege to Biafra. Foreign correspondents in the blockaded enclave spotted the first signs of famine that spring, and by early summer there were reports that thousands of the youngest Biafrans were dying each day. Hardly anybody in the rest of the world paid attention until a reporter from the Sun, the London tabloid, visited Biafra with a photographer and encountered the wasting children: eerie, withered little wraiths. The paper ran the pictures alongside harrowing reportage for days on end. Soon, the story got picked up by newspapers all over the world. More photographers made their way to Biafra, and television crews, too. The civil war in Nigeria was the first African war to be televised. Suddenly, Biafra’s hunger was one of the defining stories of the age—the graphic suffering of innocents made an inescapable appeal to conscience—and the humanitarian-aid business as we know it today came into being.

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Why Cutting The Military Budget Is Essential To America’s Future

The waiter puts your plate of food on the table, and you comment that there’s no vegetable. He hands you a bottle of ketchup and says, “Here’s your vegetable,” and walks away.

Sound ludicrous? That was the opening salvo fired by Ronald Reagan in his war on the underprivileged and disadvantaged in his inaugural year as President in 1981. To save money on those wasteful school lunch programs for the needy, Reagan and his budget director, David Stockman, suggested ketchup be considered a vegetable rather than a condiment. While roundly ridiculed and unsuccessful, this wasn’t Reagan’s last assault on the impoverished, just his first.

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Why ChildFund Doesn’t Deserve Your Money

ChildFund’s commercials can almost be recited by rote: Alan Sader (or, conversely, Sally Struthers) toots around a third world hamlet, kneeling next to anemic skeleton-children, begging you to donate a few cents a day to sponsor these kids and save their lives. Melancholy piano music tinkles in the background while middle-class guilt is triggered nationwide.

These commercials are probably ChildFund at their most consistent, as otherwise ChildFund’s goals are murky and ill-defined. Beneath the surface, the charity is in a constant state of identity crisis, which has manifested itself in several ways.

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