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Pork Buns… on Flickr.

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 12:11:40 -0500

Pork Buns… on Flickr.

Copyfried on Flickr.

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 20:42:45 -0500

Copyfried on Flickr.

thedailywhat: On Kony 2012: I honestly wanted to stay as far...

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 12:15:30 -0500

thedailywhat:

On Kony 2012: I honestly wanted to stay as far away as possible from KONY 2012, the latest fauxtivist fad sweeping the web (remember “change your Facebook profile pic to stop child abuse”?), but you clearly won’t stop sending me that damn video until I say something about it, so here goes:

Stop sending me that video.

The organization behind Kony 2012 — Invisible Children Inc. — is an extremely shady nonprofit that has been called ”misleading,” “naive,” and “dangerous” by a Yale political science professor, and has been accused by Foreign Affairs of “manipulat[ing] facts for strategic purposes.” They have also been criticized by the Better Business Bureau for refusing to provide information necessary to determine if IC meets the Bureau’s standards.

Additionally, IC has a low two-star rating in accountability from Charity Navigator because they won’t let their financials be independently audited. That’s not a good thing. In fact, it’s a very bad thing, and should make you immediately pause and reflect on where the money you’re sending them is going.

By IC’s own admission, only 31% of all the funds they receive go toward actually helping anyone [pdf]. The rest go to line the pockets of the three people in charge of the organization, to pay for their travel expenses (over $1 million in the last year alone) and to fund their filmmaking business (also over a million) — which is quite an effective way to make more money, as clearly illustrated by the fact that so many can’t seem to stop forwarding their well-engineered emotional blackmail to everyone they’ve ever known.

And as far as what they do with that money:

The group is in favour of direct military intervention, and their money supports the Ugandan government’s army and various other military forces. Here’s a photo of the founders of Invisible Children posing with weapons and personnel of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. Both the Ugandan army and Sudan People’s Liberation Army are riddled with accusations of rape and looting, but Invisible Children defends them, arguing that the Ugandan army is “better equipped than that of any of the other affected countries”, although Kony is no longer active in Uganda and hasn’t been since 2006 by their own admission. These books each refer to the rape and sexual assault that are perennial issues with the UPDF, the military group Invisible Children is defending.

Let’s not get our lines crossed: The Lord’s Resistance Army is bad news. And Joseph Kony is a very bad man, and needs to be stopped. But propping up Uganda’s decades-old dictatorship and its military arm, which has been accused by the UN of committing unspeakable atrocities and itself facilitated the recruitment of child soldiers, is not the way to go about it.

The United States is already plenty involved in helping rout Kony and his band of psycho sycophants. Kony is on the run, having been pushed out of Uganda, and it’s likely he will soon be caught, if he isn’t already dead. But killing Kony won’t fix anything, just as killing Osama bin Laden didn’t end terrorism. The LRA might collapse, but, as Foreign Affairs points out, it is “a relatively small player in all of this — as much a symptom as a cause of the endemic violence.”

Myopically placing the blame for all of central Africa’s woes on Kony — even as a starting point — will only imperil many more people than are already in danger.

Sending money to a nonprofit that wants to muck things up by dousing the flames with fuel is not helping. Want to help? Really want to help? Send your money to nonprofits that are putting more than 31% toward rebuilding the region’s medical and educational infrastructure, so that former child soldiers have something worth coming home to.

Here are just a few of those charities. They all have a sparkling four-star rating from Charity Navigator, and, more importantly, no interest in airdropping American troops armed to the teeth into the middle of a multi-nation tribal war to help one madman catch another.

The bottom line is, research your causes thoroughly. Don’t just forward a random video to a stranger because a mass murderer makes a five-year-old “sad.” Learn a little bit about the complexities of the region’s ongoing strife before advocating for direct military intervention.

There is no black and white in the world. And going about solving important problems like there is just serves to make all those equally troubling shades of gray invisible.

[kony2012.]

a hitherto unknown segment of existence: Twitter: a love story in two acts

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 02:02:27 -0500

a hitherto unknown segment of existence: Twitter: a love story in two acts:

hithertodotnet:

I fell in love with twitter twice. In the intervening period things were rocky — I wasn’t sure if she was the social network for me. But recently that’s changed again.

The first time I fell in love with twitter was at South By Southwest in March 2007, and is important because it’s (partly) how I…

I still love the little quirky bits in our UI design. -/\/

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 22:19:56 -0500

I still love the little quirky bits in our UI design.

-/\/

samspratt: Sam Spratt’s SEPTEMBER Portrait Contest/Custom...

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 12:16:58 -0400

samspratt:

Sam Spratt’s SEPTEMBER Portrait Contest/Custom Portrait Giveaway!

It’s back. To show my appreciation for all of you following me here, As usual—I am giving one guy/man/dude AND one girl/woman/chick the chance to win a custom portrait from me. Free, no strings attached. Here’s the breakdown:

What You Get:

A Web-resolution (1100 pixel) custom portrait, tailored to your most bizarre of requests. You can get a very traditional portrait done or as outlandish as you can dream—so long as it remains in the portrait format. Zombies, Hipsters, Pirates, Ninjas, Superheroes, Robots, etc. are all fair-game themes in which you can have yourself transmogrified in painted form. Want to let me have free reign? That works too, but I want to make something unique to you.

How to Enter:

1. FACEBOOK: Simply comment on my facebook contest link!

2. TWITTER: Tweet this post by @mentioning my twitter handle @samspratt http://twitter.com/#!/SamSpratt This also counts as an entry.

3. TUMBLR: If you reblog this photo from me, that will enter you as well.

How to Increase Your Odds:

If you share this with yours friends on facebook by tagging this page with the “@” symbol before “Sam Spratt Illustration” on your wall it will “linkify” this page. This counts as an additional entry.

(If you enter all 4 ways, you will have 4x the odds of winning)

How long this will last:

I will keep the contest open through September with winners announced in early October.

You all are the best! Good luck and thanks again to all who follow my little slice of artwork on the web.