5 Beloved Groups Everyone Forgot Did Terrible Things

5

Watch Out, Or The Susan G. Komen Foundation Will Sue The Crap Out Of You

A lot of people say that they hate cancer, but the Susan G. Komen foundation puts their (and your) money where their mouth is. It all started when Nancy Goodman Brinker's sister, Susan, died of breast cancer in 1980. Like a Steven Seagal character, Nancy promised her fallen sibling that she'd do everything to get the bastard that killed her. And she has. By 1982, the "Susan G. Komen for the Cure" organization was on its feet, and had been awarded its first $28,000 research grant. So far to date, a whopping $2 billion have gone into cancer-fighting things like research and advocacy.

Susan G. Komen Foundation

That's ... that's a lot of cancer-fightin' money. Surely, every penny has gone to the greater good.

Well, not so much. It turns out that some of that pocket change you handed over goes to making sure that mom and pop charities don't use the word "cure," or even the freaking color pink. Real, actual money that could be used to help fund research instead goes directly into the pockets of lawyers (both for Komen and for the Joe Shmoes being sued). How dare Mary Ann Tighe of Long Island run a kite-flying event to fund lung cancer research and call it "Kites for the Cure"? Or the other 80-odd organizations that used the word "cure" or the color pink in some form?

Kites for a CureThe band The Cure wear all black, just to be on the safe side.

The good news is that sometimes Komen's lawyers fail, and organizations like "Mush for a Cure" are able to fight back and keep their names. Michael N. Mercanti, a lawyer who represented this small charity operation, said, "They shouldn't be spending money on lawyers when people give their donations to find cures for breast cancer." He's got a point. We have a feeling that a lot fewer people would donate at the supermarket if the cashier said, "Would you like to give 8 cents for some petty bullshit?"

4

Doctors Without Borders Will Save You From ISIS (Unless You Don't Officially Work For Them)

Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Doctors Without Borders for us dirty English speakers, is about as close to the Justice League as you can get without superpowers. They're funded with 1.63 billion buckaroos per year -- so really, it's a Justice League of Bruce Waynes, but better, because they're not working through severe psychological trauma by beating the shit out of people. They even limit their funding from governments so their decision-making can't be influenced by corrupt politicians, fer goshsakes. Well, light a candle and prepare yourselves, because it's about to get dark.

3

NASA Conducted A Sting Operation On An Elderly Widow, Causing Her To Pee Herself

Who doesn't love space and the brave folks who boldly go, and so forth? From the scientists, mathematicians, and engineers behind the spacecraft to the actual astronauts themselves, it takes a lot of extremely rad people to bring what was once science fiction into reality. Surely, all of the time and resources poured into making these things happen are well-spent, and the planet's smartest people wouldn't do something as '80s villain as bullying an old woman until she pees herself in a sting operation!

2

Nobel Prize Judges Allowed A Doctor To Conduct Fatal Experiments

Receiving a Nobel Prize for anything at all ranks somewhere between "the most rad thing you can accomplish in a single lifetime" and, if you're Marie Curie, "Another one?" It pretty much ensures that your name is immortalized and everyone has to admit you're a non-garbage-person. So we expect that the judges who determine who gets one of the most prestigious awards on the planet will know what they're doing, and also not let fatal human experiments happen right under their noses.

Cue the sad trombone, because obviously that's exactly what happened. Paolo Macchiarini was, for years, the star surgeon working under the Karolinska Institute, the judges for the Nobel Prize for Medicine. Charming, handsome, and apparently brilliant, he was allowed to perform experiments with replacing people's windpipes beginning in 2008 -- first with plastic windpipes, and then with the stem cells of windpipes taken from dead people. Macchiarini had created a revolutionary new procedure which he believed would change medical science forever. The only tiny little downside was that most of his lucky windpipe recipients kept dying, because fucking duh, of course they did.

1

The Girl Scouts Don't Care About Ape Murder

There isn't much in the world more wholesome than a troupe of Girl Scouts going door-to-door selling their delicious, addicting, paycheck-destroying cookies. As if the cookies weren't enough, they do a lot of good for the world in their work. They accept LGBT youth, they recently joined with Google's program Made With Code to teach girls to do rad computer things, they added 23 badges for STEM exploration, and there's also a badge for Metal Arts, which sounds, you know ... metal.

It's too bad that this wholesome organization not only has an empty garden of fucks to give about the brutalization and murder of orangutans, but also knowingly contributes to it.

In 2006, Girl Scouters Madison Vorva and Rhiannon Tomtishen discovered that their cookies contain palm oil. For those not in the know, palm oil comes from farmers demolishing rainforests in Indonesia and Malaysia in order to plant their palm trees. While destroying the habitat of many species is bad enough, orangutans get hit the hardest. They're being burned and buried alive, beaten to death, and hacked to pieces with machetes -- the most intelligent of the apes are being given some extremely good reasons to rise up and reenact Planet Of The Apes. And you know what, we'd let them. We are awful.

Girl Scouts of America"I'm sorry, I ordered Samoas, not Ape Tears." "They're all Ape Tears."

So what did Girl Scout executives do when these girls presented the issue to them? Silence them, of course. They deleted Facebook posts, turned off the ability for people to share links, and had one conference call in 2008 which has not been followed up on since. Their official response: "Our bakers don't believe that there is a viable alternative to produce the taste, the quality, all of the attributes which our consumers and our members require and expect out of our cookies." It's simply not the same without the pain and misery behind them, you know?

So there you have it. Girl Scout officials think the brutalization and murder of our closest kin is justified as long as their cookies remain as tasty as always. Enjoy your Thin Mints and Do-Si-Dos, folks. Surely the remains of buried and forgotten apes have not at all seeped into the palm trees that supply a key ingredient in them, and their angry spirits are definitely not haunting your bowels.

Just in case you got a Thin Mint fix right now, we've got your back.

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