Maybe their hearts were in the right place. Maybe not. Either way, these are solid contenders for the title of “worst attempts at helping others since colonialism.”1. One million t- shirts for Africa. Foreign aid circles employ the cynical acronym SWEDOW (stuff we don’t want) to describe initiatives like Jason Sadler’s 1 Million T- Shirts project. Sadler had admittedly never been to Africa, and had never worked in an aid or development environment before. But he cared a great deal, and came up with the idea to send a million free shirts to Africa in order to help the people there. Like some sort of lightning rod for the combined venom of the humanitarian aid world, Jason found himself pilloried across the web in a matter of weeks. Everyone from armchair bloggers to senior economists spat fire on his dream until it eventually ground to a halt. In July 2. 01. 0, Jason threw in the towel and abandoned his scheme. And somewhere in Africa, an economy sighed in relief. Why was the idea so bad? Firstly, it’s debatable whether there is actually a need for T- shirts in Africa. There is practically nowhere that people who want shirts are unable to afford them. Wanting to donate them is a classic case of having something you want to donate and assuming it is needed. Just because you have a really large hammer does not mean that everything in the world is a nail. Secondly, dumping a million free shirts is inefficient. What it would cost to pack them, ship them, and transport them overland to wherever it is they are meant to go would cost close to the manufacturing cost of the shirts in the first place. That’s just incredibly wasteful. If you wanted to get people shirts, it would be far more cost effective to simply commission their manufacture locally, creating a stimulus to the local textile economy in the process. Which brings us to the third critique of free stuff. When people in the target community already have an economy functioning in part on the sale and repair of the stuff you want to donate (shirts in this instance), then dumping a million of them free is the economic equivalent of an atom bomb. Episode Released Stooge Team Transcribed By; SOUP TO NUTS : 1930-09-28: Ted Healy and His Stooges: Moron4392: Ted is a salesman for the Schmidt Costume Shop who likes. ![]() ![]() Why buy a shirt anymore when you can get a five- year supply for free? Why get yours repaired when you can simply toss it and get another? And in the process everyone who once sold shirts or practiced tailoring finds themselves unemployed and unable to provide money for themselves or their families to buy anything. Except shirts. Because those are now free. And before you think dumping free shirts is the sin of an uneducated maverick, Jason’s poor logic was subsequently repeated by World Vision, in accepting 1. NFL shirts to dump on some poor, shirtless village in Africa. TOMS Buy- One- Give- One. Bearing in mind all of the criticisms above, TOMS Shoes has built a brand on the premise that buying one pair of their shoes automatically includes the provision of another pair to an underprivileged child in a developing nation somewhere. Three months after Jason abandoned sending a million shirts to Africa, TOMS celebrated sending a million pairs of shoes to the underprivileged. It continues to do so. While there are possibly more people in the world who need shoes than might need shirts (though this is debatable), TOMS can be (and has been) broadly criticised for the same kinds of unintended consequences of dumping shoes in places where people might otherwise be employed to make them. Further, though, the TOMS campaign — like the million shirts — misses the fundamental point that not having a pair of shoes (or a shirt, christmas toy, etc.) is not a problem about not having shoes. It’s a problem of poverty. Shoelessness, such as it is, is a symptom of a much bigger and more complex problem. Description: The young master can quote the stats for any monster, but now he thinks he's a hunter, too. Someone beat the colorful Khezu in the Sunken Hollow before. STEELEYE SPAN and ALBION BAND guitarist guests with MAGNA CARTA! Chris Simpson and Ken Nicol [photo: Cathy Simpson] Former Steeleye Span and Albion Band member KEN. This is the 'Ancient China for Elementary/Middle School' page of the 'Ancient China' guide. Alternate Page for Screenreader Users Skip to Page Navigation. Matador is a travel and lifestyle brand redefining travel media with cutting edge adventure stories, photojournalism, and social commentary. ![]() ![]() ![]() And while donating a pair of shoes helps shoelessness, it does not help poverty. Things like jobs help poverty. Jobs making things like shoes, for example. But TOMS doesn’t make its shoes in Africa, it makes them in China where it’s presumably cheaper to make two pairs of shoes and give one away than it is to get people in a needier community to make one pair of shoes. The result of this setup, as Zizek explains most succinctly, is that on a big- picture level, TOMS (and other buy- my- product- and- donate companies) are busy building the exploitative global structure that produces economic inequality, while on the other hand pretending that supporting them actually does something to fix it. It doesn’t. It just gives people shoes. Machine gun preacher. The criticisms of TOMS, Jason, and other purveyors of SWEDOW tend to be intellectual, economic concerns. Problems with Sam Childers, the machine gun preacher, are so much more straightforward. It’s dangerous and insane. After a misspent youth in the United States and a few years behind bars, Childers headed to Sudan on a missionary project to repair huts devastated in the war. There he would be commanded by God to build an orphanage for local children and, incidentally, take up arms against the Lord’s Resistance Army, who was terrorizing the region. With an AK- 4. 7 and a Bible, Sam would spread the wrath of the Lord and rescue abducted children for the next few years. Imagine John Rambo with a biker’s beard hunting rebels in the savannah and you pretty much get the idea. No matter how much you care to help the women/children/villages/gorillas in a particular warzone, trying to solve what is in effect a problem of armed insecurity through establishing another minor armed militia is never a good idea. However entertaining the film turns out to be, it’s the security studies equivalent of pouring gasoline on a forest fire. Peace — and a long- term future for those affected by violence in what is now South Sudan — can only be guaranteed through a diplomatic agreement between the groups that command the thousands of men with guns. Playing Rambo in the bush would not be tolerated back home, and it shouldn’t be here in Africa. Childers is not the first person to get the crazy idea of solving violent situations by running in with guns. Hussein Mohammed Farah Aidid is an ex- Marine, and the son of Gen. Mohammed Farah Aidid (of Black Hawk Down fame), who returned to Somalia in 1. Habr Gedir clan in the country’s civil war. That hasn’t worked out so well either. Cent ransoming children in Somalia. Just this month, rapper 5. Cent visited Dolow in Somalia at the request of the World Food Programme. The trip was presumably intended to raise awareness of the issues in the way that Angelina Jolie and George Clooney did for Sudan and Oprah did for South Africa. There are quite a few examples of celebrities connecting with Africa actually. There is even a map to keep track of who has “dibs” on what region. If the trip was nothing more than Fifty touring hard- hit areas in order to bring the world’s lazy media along, then it would have been useful at best, and benign at worst. But there is more. If you Like the Facebook page for his Street King energy drink, he will provide a meal for a child in need. If the page received a million Likes before Sunday, he would donate an additional million meals. So let’s break that down. If you Like Fifty’s Facebook page — without even buying the drink — a child, presumably in Somalia, gets fed. We can infer that there is a pot of dollars somewhere earmarked for feeding needy children. Two million meals worth of feeding if you count the million Like- meals plus the potential million bonus. Those meals, while they could be donated, and have presumably been budgeted for, will not be, except to the extent that you give Street King props online. That, ladies and gentlemen, is called extortion. Dramatically photographed, concealed- as- humanitarian- activism, extortion. I can feed so very many meals to these starving children, but I won’t unless you give me something. The benefit of involving celebrities in foreign aid work is often that it works to focus the attention of their fans and the media machine more generally on understanding, for however brief a moment, something that is happening somewhere in the world. Out of that can come the kind of empathy and activism that makes things like the Save Darfur campaign possible. The celebrity’s contribution, though, hinges on whether they can successfully translate attention on them into attention to the issues. When a humanitarian issue becomes a platform for pushing an energy drink on the back of people’s suffering, we should be ashamed. Donor fund restrictions. Not so much an organisation or a specific event, this a policy constraint that isn’t as widely known as it should be. When many governments donate foreign aid money to countries that have been wracked by disasters, or which require long- term assistance, it often comes with a giant asterisk in the fine print: A significant portion of the cash provided for such assistance must be spent on goods and services provided by suppliers from the donating country. Not only inefficient, this policy prescription can lead to outright ridiculous results. In the case of the Mozambique floods in 2. I met a medical volunteer who explained how the only US- made bikes that they could find to get around the country on short notice were Harley Davidsons. And so three of them ended up running between medical stations like some breed of medical Hell’s Angel. Fascinating to behold, but utterly wasteful. Far more troublesome, as is often the case, are the economics of this sort of donate- and- bill- back activity. Where the donor aid money is tied to spending on donor- country products and services, far less of the amount spent in foreign aid actually ends up benefitting the recipient country. Few local people are employed, and few local organisations see any new opportunities to bid for and provide aid- goods. Be Careful What You Wish For"I DIDN'T MEAN IT!".. A character makes a wish and actually gets what they wished for, only to find that the reality does not live up to their fantasy. This trope is all about how a character who makes a wish comes to regret it; the actual circumstances vary. The wisher may or may not have known that their wish was actually going to be heard. The one which grants it may be anything from a wish- granting Genie who wants to show the character the error of their ways to a Jackass Genie who just wants them to suffer. A sudden appearance by Louis Cypher, ready to offer a Deal with the Devil, is not out of the question either. Sometimes the character gets a tour through an Alternate Timeline. Other times the mechanism of the granted wish is not even explained — the wisher gets what they want through nothing more than an ironic and coincidental twist of circumstances. The "deal breaker" that makes the wish not worth it also comes in a lot of possible flavors. Perhaps the character finds out that what they wanted comes at the cost of something they wanted even more. Maybe the element of their life that they wanted gone is really essential to who they are; maybe the wish isn't all they thought it was cracked up to be; or maybe it just comes true in an unanticipated manner. In many cases the character repents of their ill- considered wish and things revert to normal, though in some stories the character is stuck in the new situation and forced to deal with the consequences of her/his thoughtless wish. This is an elementary form of deconstruction — The character wants X, and then they find out that X has unforeseen consequences or is less satisfying than expected. Nine times of ten this is an outright Aesop, though strictly speaking it doesn't have to be. A crucial element of playing that angle well is making the "deal breaker" a meaningful, inherent flaw to the original wish rather than something tacked on or that could have easily turned out differently if the character had more common sense. Otherwise, a Broken Aesop is guaranteed. Often a cause of Blessed with Suck, though not the only one; wont to count as an Opinion- Changing Dream; Contains the same type of irony as Ironic Hell. In some cases the experience may lead the wisher to discover an Awful Truth. Sub- Trope of Be Careful What You Say. Super Trope of It's a Wonderful Plot, I Wish It Were Real, I Wished You Were Dead, Please Dump Me, and Rhetorical Request Blunder. Compare Gone Horribly Right, when science or logic is involved rather than wishes, and Wanting Is Better Than Having, when getting your wish ends with more disappointment than satisfaction. Contrast the Literal Genie, which ignores the intent of the wish in favor of the exact words; this trope is about the complications that arise when you get exactly what you wanted, rather than exactly what you said. A Jackass Genie is likely to cause this to happen, if he doesn't just twist your words entirely. The Benevolent Genie, too, may make this happen if he thinks you "need to learn the lesson from getting your wish, or if he lacks the common sense or human perspective to see that the wish is disastrous, or if he is just constrained to grant the wish no matter how disastrous it is. Comic Books In the very first issue of "Action Comics 1" — the comic book that began the saga of Superman — the feature story included an episode where three gangsters kidnap a woman (later known as Lois Lane) as she is traveling home from a nightclub in a taxi. Clark Kent and Lois were dancing at the nightclub when one of the gangster's, Butch, smugly tries to cut in, but Lois refuses. Kent tries to stand up to Butch but gets nowhere. Later, after Butch and his goons have kidnapped Lois (no doubt planning to take her to a remote location to brutally beat and rape her), Butch arrogantly hopes that Kent will come after him .. Kent (now as Superman) is coming to the rescue. The confrontation leads to Superman catching and (easily) picking up their car, shaking it violently so that the bad guys fall out and then, after securing Lois' safety, vaulting the now scared- out- of- his- wits Butch onto a telephone wire to await the authorities. In the "Id" story line of JLA, a group of 6th- dimensional beings release an entity capable of granting wishes.. Literal Genie. It affects the league, splitting them into their superheroic and secret identities, and wreaks havoc (most hilariously when some guy wishes his boss would go to hell). In the end, Plastic Man's alter- ego pulls the league back together, comes up with a plan to defeat Id, and saves Earth. In Avril Lavigne's Make 5 Wishes since there is no Reset Button at the end. Protagonist Hana, having used up all five wishes and finding herself no better off, maybe even worse, than at the beginning of the story, decides to jump off a bridge so as to get rid of the demon Romeo and prevent his magic from harming anyone ever again. Romeo somehow escapes from the box before they reach the riverbed, claiming that he "can't die." The last page shows a news report saying that Hana's body has still not been found. Wish You Were Here", a 1. EC Comics horror title The Haunt of Fear, uses a variation of "The Monkey's Paw" story: A businessman's wife discovers an enchanted Chinese figurine and wishes for a fortune. Learning that her husband was killed while driving to his lawyer's office (after naming her the beneficiary of a generous life insurance policy) and remembering what happened in "The Monkey's Paw", she wishes for him to be brought back to the way he was "just before the accident"; unfortunately, he's still a corpse since his actual death was due to a heart attack. She uses the third and final wish to make him "alive now, alive forever!".. Even her hacking him to tiny bits can't put him out of his misery. The comic was later adapted for the 1. Tales from the Crypt.). From Knights of the Dinner Table. When given the opportunity for a Wish, resident Rules Lawyer Brian pulls out a 2. It's so complex that the Dungeon Master has to call several other DMs to help him interpret it. Ultimately, B. A. While the wish was airtight the immortality granted to Brian leaves a vengeful deity he previously pissed off free to attack him with full force. Fortunately for Brian, a clause of the wish stated that if he died as a direct consequence of the wish, all effects of the wish would be undone and Brian would get a 2. In the Star Trek: The Next Generation comic "Artificiality", Captain Picard, at a crewmember's funeral, wishes that all of his crew were as durable as Data. Q obliges him by turning the whole crew into Soong- type androids. This tends to happen quite often in the Grimm Fairy Tales comic series. The 2. 01. 1 "Heart of the Monster" arc in The Incredible Hulks is built around this trope - Hulk and his team encounter a Wishing Well. Everyone involved is Genre Savvy enough to know what it will twist every wish it grants. What they don't know is the intentions of the Red She- Hulk, who used it to wish doom on her ex- husband.. As it turns out, she hated him at the time, meaning all of his dreams briefly came true. Doctor Strange, in a moment of grief after losing Clea, wished he were dead. Enter D'Spayre, who put him through a series of Mind Screws so painful that Strange nearly took his own life. In a Transformers: More than Meets the Eye sidestory, Trailcutter briefly wishes that he no longer had his signature forcefield before going to sleep as he feels that is the only thing people remember about him. When he awakens, an malfunctioning pulse weapon has frozen everyone else on the ship and taken away his ability to project forcefields. He later learns that his forcefields are what protected him from the inventions effects. In the Archie Comics' Sonic the Hedgehog comic Mina Mongoose, after being traumatized by the Iron Dominion's occupation of New Mobotropolis and of NICOLE's brief Magitek- induced. FaceHeel Turn, uses her status as a music icon to send a message across the city to inspire them and raise awareness concerning possible problems should NICOLE become compromised again. In comes Ixis Naugus, who uses his magic to augment all existing feelings of anger and fear in the public to turn NICOLE into a Hero with Bad Publicity and eventually get her exiled from the city altogether, which, combined with the revelation that NICOLE was acting as The Mole proceeding Sonic and Sally's departure from the city, leaves Mina guilt- ridden. When Mina goes to Freedom HQ, the place of NICOLE's exile, to speak with her and apologize, NICOLE explicitly informs her that with her exile, she got what she wanted. A laser guided version occurs in The Sandman. Richard Madoc participates in the sex- trafficking of a muse because, as a writer, he needs ideas. It all works pretty well for him until Morpheus gives him more ideas than his brain can handle. In a sense, in Seconds, as Katie starts using the mushrooms to make long term changes in her life. As you can imagine, she quickly finds out there's no such thing as a "perfect" life. In The Just #1, Damian Wayne says that the world needs a genius supervillain like his mom or his grandad. It has one. He's sleeping with her. Paul Patton, a. k. The Fox, originally became a costumed crimefighter to better attract stories and scoops, being a photojournalist and everything, but by the time of The Fox Hunt, he can't seem to stay away from front page news (read: crazy dangerous villains) and has begun to see his Freak Magnet- ness as a curse. In Empowered three high- school students were given an art assignment to imagine themselves as superpowered people. They imagined themselves as a pair of angel and devil Conjoined Twins, a warrior with cynderblocks for hands and head, and a Tyrannosaurus rex- human hybrid.. And when they woke up the next morning, they had become just that. Only the tyrannosaurus was happy with it.
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