Comment

Comment by Neal yesterday

Well, that sucks.

Comment by Chris on Sunday

Database of America's Worst Charities based on cash paid to solicitors in the past decade. 

The article America's Worst Charities.

America's 50 worst charities rake in nearly $1 billion for corporate fundraisers.

The worst charity in America operates from a metal warehouse behind a gas station in Holiday.

Every year, Kids Wish Network raises millions of dollars in donations in the name of dying children and their families.

Every year, it spends less than 3 cents on the dollar helping kids.

Most of the rest gets diverted to enrich the charity's operators and the for-profit companies Kids Wish hires to drum up donations.

In the past decade alone, Kids Wish has channeled nearly $110 million donated for sick children to its corporate solicitors. An additional $4.8 million has gone to pay the charity's founder and his own consulting firms.

No charity in the nation has siphoned more money away from the needy over a longer period of time.

But Kids Wish is not an isolated case, a yearlong investigation by the Tampa Bay Times and The Center for Investigative Reporting has found.

Using state and federal records, the Times and CIR identified nearly 6,000 charities that have chosen to pay for-profit companies to raise their donations.

Then reporters took an unprecedented look back to zero in on the 50 worst — based on the money they diverted to boiler room operators and other solicitors over a decade.

These nonprofits adopt popular causes or mimic well-known charity names that fool donors. Then they rake in cash, year after year.

The nation's 50 worst charities have paid their solicitors nearly $1 billion over the past 10 years that could have gone to charitable works.

Until today, no one had tallied the cost of this parasitic segment of the nonprofit industry or traced the long history of its worst offenders.

Among the findings:

• The 50 worst charities in America devote less than 4 percent of donations raised to direct cash aid. Some charities give even less. Over a decade, one diabetes charity raised nearly $14 million and gave about $10,000 to patients. Six spent nothing at all on direct cash aid.

More here. Part's 2 and 3 can be found here.

Advice on how you can avoid giving money to bad charities. Tip No. 1: Look out for groups that mimic the names of well-established charities.

Comment by Neal on May 26, 2013 at 3:32pm

Probably more newsy than anything, yet when someone is offended by morals, I wonder if the outrage is real - we shouldn't discuss morals when it comes to policing the world - or if it's just the only thing he could come up with.

GOP Congressman ‘Offended’ By Moral Questions Obama Addressed In Counterterror Speech
By Ben Armbruster on May 26, 2013 at 10:16 am

Rep. Peter King (R-NY) (Credit: AP)

The House Homeland Security Committee chairman said on Sunday that he was “offended” that President Obama considered moral questions about U.S. counterterrorism policy in his major speech on national security last week.

“That’s what bothered me about the president’s speech,” Rep. Peter King (R-NY) said on ABC’s This Week, was “the moral anguishing he was going through.” When asked whether the Obama administration should change its drone policy, King replied, “If it does change it shouldn’t change for moral reasons,” apparently because the New York Republican thinks the United States should’t have to ask moral questions about its foreign policy:

KING: Listen, every soldier, every cop who is faced with a decision to make, life or death, does the best he or she can and I think our country has done more than any country in the history of the world to limit civilian casualties so that just offended me, that whole tone of it. [...]
As far as the policy …. I think this policy basically has worked … and perhaps we can fine tune it, we can put more emphasis on clandestine activity of actually gathering intelligence rather than relying so much on drones but for me i don’t think the president really addressed that in the speech. I think he was coming at it from a more from this moral tone which I just think was misplaced. I don’t think it’s called for.

Think Progress

Comment by doone on May 22, 2013 at 1:11pm

THE MORAL STATUS OF ROCKS

Justin E. H. Smith in his blog:

A student in rural Iceland, of sheep-farming stock, had her guard down, or didn't yet have a guard. She didn't know how to talk to foreigners, or perhaps felt there was something she had to get across to foreigners, or to this foreigner, who showed an interest in her country. She said, in the hope of conveying to me the whole ethical-spiritual outlook of her country in a single concrete example: In Iceland we are taught not to smash rocks. 

In recent years something called 'environmental ethics' is moving into the mainstream, finding space alongside the Kantian, the utilitarian, and so on, which for their part suppose that an ethical relation can only be had toward an ethical subject, and that such subjects are found only among human or at most animal beings. Even environmental ethics tends to imagine the environment with a thick arboreal canopy, with lush grass, and lillypads covering seething green ponds. But in the Arctic and sub-Arctic the 'environment' is mostly a geological rather than a biological phenomenon, and it is not altogether surprising that in such a setting rocks come forward as phenomenally salient, as creatures, as others, more readily than in the Amazon. And still less do the rocks come forward as our petrous co-beings in the big cities of the world, where they only appear ground down and formed into angular artifacts of human ingenuity, which in turn you are not supposed to smash, since in the process of their transformation they have become 'property'. 

More here.

Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 12:08 PM | Permalink | 

Comment by doone on May 20, 2013 at 8:47pm

Atheists like children

Mali the orangutan is a new mom! New pictures of Mali and her baby were released by the Paignton Zoo.

I’ve zoomed in on the baby in every picture because LOOK AT THAT FACE.

You’re welcome.

Comment by Chris on May 20, 2013 at 4:50pm

Religions where being human is a sin set their subjects up to fail so they can come in and rescue them from their human frailties.
It's disgusting.

Comment by Neal on May 20, 2013 at 8:19am

I would go even farther and say religion has perverted morality. Changed what was good into something used for control.

Comment by doone on May 19, 2013 at 12:09pm

An Experiment That's Never Been Tried: Morality Without Religion

JONATHAN FOWLER AND ELIZABETH RODD

If being moral is so easy, can we dispense with religion altogether? . . . READ »

Comment by doone on April 30, 2013 at 6:44pm

Primates And Fairness

APR 30 2013 @ 3:30PM

It’s in our genes, as demonstrated by one pissed off monkey:

Comment by Neal on April 25, 2013 at 11:23am

#21 pretty much sums it up. =)

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