Big Charity

It must be tough running a charity. You’ve got a cause you care deeply about, and you’re constantly juggling the game of having to spend money (in administration, advertising, staff) to raise money (for the cause!), and worse, of sometimes having to compromise to achieve your goals — you sometimes have to work with your enemies to get where you’re going. And if you’re really, really good at it, and raise lots and lots of money, it becomes easy to lose sight of the cause while becoming corporate.

So it goes with Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the $400 million/year giant pink gorilla of cancer charities, fighting for the cause of ending breast cancer. As charities go, they’re reasonably efficent (about 20% of their budget is overhead, 20% goes to cancer research, and the rest goes to education and health care), and they’re certainly effective — they practically own the color pink, it seems, and their little pink ribbons are ubiquitous. If you’ve donated money to them in the past, you should have no regrets, and you can pat yourself on the back for having done some good.

But it’s time to cut the cord to this Big Charity.

Komen has lost sight of the cause, and has become more of a money-raising machine, for one thing. This is one of those awkward compromises they made to tap into corporate interests: they sold their identity and their label to anyone willing to cough up the cash. One correlation with the incidence of breast cancer is dietary fat — yet Komen went into a commercial promotion with KFC, selling big pink buckets of greasy fried chicken.

It was this national nonprofit education and advocacy organization that coined the term “pinkwashing” to describe the situation where a company purports to care about breast cancer by promoting a pink-ribboned product, but manufactures products that are linked to the disease.

This latest campaign between KFC and Komen is “simply pinkwashing at its worst,” Barbara A. Brenner, JD, executive director of BCA, told Medscape Oncology. “This is just so wrong on every level. . . . This is so much more about KFC’s bottom line than about curing breast cancer,” she said.

This is just one example of losing sight of the goal. I would argue that in addition they’ve been too successful: their marketing has obscured their purpose. We’re drowning in a sea of pink every time breast cancer is brought up, and the symbol of slapping a pink ribbon on something has replaced the substance of the cause. I always say that prayer is the very least you can do, but slapping a ribbon on your car is a very close runner-up.

And now, the last straw. Ultimately, breast cancer research is one part of improving women’s health; if that narrow slice of concern begins to cannibalize the wider aspects of women’s well-being, it does more harm than good. The Susan G. Komen Foundation has reached that point where the money-making machine is being hijacked to benefit organizations that do harm to women.

Specifically, Komen has yanked its support for breast-cancer screenings at Planned Parenthood. That’s astonishing. Education and screening for breast cancer is what Komen is all about — it’s what they do. It’s as if I were to announce that I reject the teaching of evolution at a particular college campus because I really hate their football team (and if I had millions of dollars worth of clout). It makes no sense from the perspective of an anti-cancer charity.

It does make sense if you’re a right-wing corporate entity that has funded its growth on a foundation of a universally appreciated cause, but that actually has closer ties to conservative corporate and religious interests. They aren’t so much against breast cancer, as they are for protecting “good” girls, and against those fornicating sluts who get abortions, and can go ahead and die horribly. They listen more to the anti-abortion crusaders (some of whom are on their executive staff!) than to women.

So don’t give to them anymore. Redirect your charitable giving to organizations that don’t have a Puritanical streak, and are a bit less Republican in outlook. There is no shortage; I recommend the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, Breast Cancer Charities of America, CancerCare, and the Cancer Research Institute. So far, they all seem to be dedicated to fighting cancer and helping people, and a lot less concerned about policing people’s morality to conform to that of the Religious Right.

But I don’t want Susan G. Komen to go away. I think it is an excellent charity for right-wingers and Christian fundamentalists to donate to — their money will go to a cause we can all support, and it’s better than filling the coffers of the Mormon or Catholic churches.

P.S. There are some very bad arguments for not donating to the Komen foundation out there, and the very worst are those that selectively cite statistics to argue that cancer research is futile. Some cancers have been refractory and have shown little progress in the last decade; others are showing significantly better statistics. But most importantly, our understanding of cancer has steadily advanced, and even where someone dies of the disease, we glean another piece of the puzzle. And of course, what do you propose to do otherwise? Nothing at all?

(Also on Sb)

True Science for Boys

Ah, the 19th century…when mad scientists were really mad, and not only that, they were popular at parties. In 1818, Dr Ure and Professor Jeffray obtained the freshly killed corpse of Matthew Clydesdale, only an hour from the hangman’s noose, and proceeded to experiment on it with a battery in the Glasgow University anatomy theater before a crowd of spectators. In my youth, I had to settle for recent roadkill, a 9 volt battery, and a dark basement, all by my lonesome — my jealousy is acute.

Here is a small portion of the account of that day’s fun.

The supra-orbital nerve was laid bare in the forehead, as it issues through the supraciliary foramen in the eyebrow: the one conducting rod being applied to it, and the other to the heel, most extraordinary grimaces were exhibited every time that electrical discharges were made, by running the wire in my hand along the edges of the last trough, from the 220th, to the 270th pair of plates: thus fifty shocks, each greater than the preceding one, were given in two seconds. Every muscle in his countenance was simultaneously thrown into fearful action: rage, horror, despair, anguish, and ghastly smile united their hideous expression in the murderer’s face; surpassing far the wildest representation of a Fuseli or a Kean. At this period several of the spectators were forced to leave the apartment from terror or sickness, and one gentleman fainted.

The account of galvanic experiments on dead bodies is taken from The Young Man’s Book of Amusement, which on the cover promises to teach card tricks and how to make fireworks. You’d think an amusement in which the first step is to obtain a dead body would be listed a little more prominently, but I guess playing with cadavers was just commonplace in the year before Queen Vickie was born.

(Also on FtB)

Friday Cephalopod: Cuteness!

The gang at Skepticon are running a poll to design the World’s Most Innocuous Atheist Billboard, and they’ve settled on the message — “Baby Animals Are Cute” — and they’ve got some choices for you to pick from. I thought I’d help and offer my own suggestion:

See? Far superior to the kittens and puppies they suggest, and it’s much more in the spirit of atheism.

DO NOT ARGUE WITH ME. Or Baby Octopus will devour you.

(Also on Sb)

Today is Shawn Otto day at UMM

We’re having a visit today from Shawn Lawrence Otto, a fellow who has been fighting against the un-American war on science on the web and in a book, Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America. He’s speaking on campus tonight at 7:30 Central, in the HFA Recital Hall — I urge local community members to show up, he has important things to say about education and climate change — and that talk is going to be streamed live, so all you distant strangers can also watch the show.

It was a little strange, though, to get messages from the university administration telling me I’m expected to go to dinner with him. It turns out, I’m in his book — there’s actually a substantial 4 or 5 page section in there where he discusses an interview he had with me (I’m getting old, and I’ve done so many interviews that they all bleed together), so I had to run out and get a copy of the book to find out what I was getting into. It all sounded a bit Chris Mooney-like.

Fortunately, the book is good — if the topic is a bit Mooneyish, it’s the Mooney of The Republican War on Science, and not the batty, Nisbet-bespelled Mooney of Unscientific America, and his stuff on me isn’t a hatchet job. Otto doesn’t come out and declare me the absolutely correct master of all I pontificate on (I’ll have to bend his ear and make suggestions for the second edition), but at least he recognizes that there are many different angles to take in fighting ignorance. You are allowed to read the book and listen to the talk without feeling outraged.

(Also on Sb)

THEY IZ NIBBLIN ON MY BRAIN!

This has to stop. Other people have named cats after me: here’s PZ Meowers from Norway.

That is a fairly typical pose for me at home, but otherwise…I think the grammar centers of my brain are eroding.

P.S. These cat pictures better be worth it. I want to see a huge surge in traffic right away, or I’m going right back to spurious spontaneous controversy generation.

I get email

Every time I mention the fact of global climate change, the denialists start sending me furious emails. (By the way, I know that AGW is “anthropogenic global warming”; what is CAGW?)

I think we can safely say that AGW believers are clinically psychotic

The psychosis of the CAGW cult is total. Rational thought is not possible. It’s like watching a freak show from the asylum.

Not ONLY must you never be near the reins of government, you should never come out of your padded room.

Right. So all the scientists who are citing the evidence and presenting the logic of greenhouse gases are the crazy ones, while the tiny fringe minority of TV weather presenters, angry Republicans who don’t want their industries regulated, and demented conspiracy theorists are the sane ones. It’s a topsy-turvy world for the denialists, isn’t it?

(Also on Sb)

Man, what did I do lately to piss people off? I’m getting a huge amount of hate mail today, much more than usual.

Hey Puss Zit
You disgusting jerk off, quit living off other peoples money and try to find a useful purpose on this planet.
How could you be such a fool?

I would like to ask all the hate-mailers to please be specific and tell me precisely what horrible thing I’ve done. Vague accusations of generic parasitism are neither informative nor entertaining.

Answer revealed: I made Marc Morano’s hit list for this post, and he has a Legion of Idiots wailing at me.

OH NOES. I IZ CONFLICTED.

A reader in Orono, Minnesota, has named their cat after me. Here’s Professor ZouZou Myers.

The red in her dark hair does resemble my coloring (before the gray took over the beard), and she is sitting on the edge of a bathtub, wishing there were squid in it, so maybe it’s OK.