tagged w/ Invisible Children
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Looking back some time ago, the KONY 2012 video that went viral about four months ago talking about invisible children? The thirty minute documentary video that have seen by the whole world spread like wildfire on the internet.
What ever happened to that movement? Did people suddenly realize it was a scam? Was it a pro-war propaganda film? There was a great deal of chatter among young kids and young adults being completely compelled to support. It was unbelievably eye opening to hear people talking about it, jumping on the bandwagon to support the cause.Looking back some time ago, the KONY 2012 video that went viral about four months ago... more
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KONY 2012: Part II -- Beyond Famous offers a closer look at the LRA and explores the solutions put forward by leaders of the currently-affected areas of CAR, DRC, and South Sudan, where local communities continue to live under the constant threat of LRA violence. This generation has responded to the call to make Joseph Kony famous. Now we need to dig deeper and turn awareness into informed action. That starts with sharing this film and continues with participating in Cover the Night, the advocacy and awareness event taking place worldwide on April 20th.KONY 2012: Part II -- Beyond Famous offers a closer look at the LRA and explores the... more
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Invisible Children activists are planning another viral marketing campaign aimed at the youth to sucker them into supporting war with Uganda.
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The first 30-minute film attracted more than 100 million views on YouTube and proved popular with young people.
The follow-up has been made without input from the group's co-founder, who suffered a mental breakdown following publicity generated by the film.
The makers promised the sequel would contain more detail and context.
Some criticised the video for oversimplifying a complex issue. Uganda's Prime Minister Amama Mbabazi said that the video wrongly gave the impression that the country was still at war.
Marketing statisics
A recent report from the US Pew Research centre concluded that the film represented a new way for young people consume news.
It found that 40% of 18-29 year-olds had heard about the video, compared with 20% of 50-64-year-olds and 18% of 50-64-year-olds.
The younger age group was also far more likely to have viewed the video. The majority heard about it via social networks such as Twitter.
"The 30-minute video... provided striking evidence that young adults and their elders at times have different news agendas and learn about news in different ways," the report said.Invisible Children activists are planning another viral marketing campaign aimed at... more
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I just posted this on my deviantart journal. Thought maybe I should share here too.
Currently, everywhere I look, people are talking about two things; the Hunger Games, or that Invisible Children documentary.
To address the documentary; Why? I know it's terribly isolationist of me, but we've got hundreds of thousands of 'Invisible Children' right the fuck here, in the US. Children on food stamps, children in foster-care, homeless children, halfway house children, children in gangs and subsidized housing and juvenile detention centers. We've got plenty of children to see to, if only we would chose to see them.
Perhaps I should put this in terms young people today can understand, and reference a popular TV show to illustrate my point.
I find myself thinking of that episode of Suburgatory, where the slightly-less-shallow-than-everyone-else Tessa Altman notices her classmates' wasteful attitudes toward the cafeteria food, and tries to get her school to consider donating leftover food to the needy. She is met with misunderstanding, funny yet offensively ignorant assumptions, and in the end no real change is affected upon the minds or habits of Tessa's contemporaries.
While the Invisible Children documentary does bring to light some seriously horrifying problems that do exist in the world today, and awareness of reality is always a good thing, it kinda pisses me off that in order for a problem to matter to young people, it's gotta be spoonfed to them in easily digestible Bytes of internet-delivered Trends. Here's an idea; put down your goddamn 4g iphone for two minutes and look around you. Find something that matters to you, that exists in the real world, right there in your own environment. There's bound to be something, I assure you, and I don't even care what it is! It could be a community garden, a soup kitchen, a skate park, a youth center, SOMETHING that will get you outside and interacting with people face to face, eye to eye.
Reconnect with humanity; it feels good.
On to the Hunger Games. I must confess, I am not watching the Hunger Games. I am not reading the trilogy the movie is based on. I'm staying away from it entirely. If I want to immerse myself in a depressing, nuanced story about a futuristic dystopian society, I'll read 1984, or Brave New World. Never heard of them? Google is your friend. I just refuse to go anywhere near this unholy hellspawn of Twilight and Battle Royale.
I know some of you must be thinking, 'Twilight? What similarities could Hunger Games possibly share with Twilight?' Well I'll tell you. There's a love triangle, complete with the twilightesque 'teams' all the fangirls seem compelled to set up for such things. It's gross.
And to be completely honest, the premise of the movie, even though 'it's been done', and this particular incarnation is obviously pitifully watered-down and disneyfied, terrifies the crap out of me. I don't LIKE watching or reading about totalitarian regimes forcing children to kill one another. It makes me sick to my stomach to think about, and quite frankly I'm horrified that our society as it stands now is so warped and twisted that millions upon millions glorify and revel in movies and games featuring violent, human-on-human brutality and murder, while the naked human form is branded as something to hide, something to be ashamed of and ashamed for, something 'unclean'. It's sick, backasswards, and just plain WRONG. And I'm done keeping quiet about it.
Any questions?I just posted this on my deviantart journal. Thought maybe I should share here too.... more
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The blonde-haired, blue-eyed, Christian filmmaker behind the Internet’s most recent famous activism campaign, “Kony 2012,” has been arrested. For masturbating. And being drunk. And vandalizing cars. In public. In the morning.
Jason Russell, 33, was arrested Thursday morning by the San Diego Police Department in Southern California and the earliest reports detailing the incident suggest it was one hell of a day already for the Invisible Children co-founder and proclaimed “mastermind” behind the Kony 2012 viral video.Police say he was described as "in his underwear" when the first 911 calls were made.
San Diego Police Department Lieutenant Andrea Brown tells a local NBC affiliate that Russell was found masturbating in public, vandalizing cars and possibly under the influence of an unknown substance at around 11:30 am on Thursday. Authorities detained him at the intersection of Ingraham Street and Riviera Drive in San Diego, only a stone’s throw from the Pacific Ocean.
When the Kony 2012 campaign was released earlier this month, Russell’s activism group, Invisible Children, described him on their website as being the “grand storyteller and dreamer” behind their operation. By Friday afternoon, however, the bio page of the Invisible Children website was unavailable.
Within minutes of the news of his arrest being released on Friday, the group issued a statement. Invisible Children CEO Ben Keesey published an one-paragraph press release, but did not touch on the topic of arrest. Instead, Keesey says, “Jason Russell was unfortunately hospitalized yesterday suffering from exhaustion, dehydration and malnutrition."
"He is now receiving medical care and is focused on getting better. The past two weeks have taken a severe emotional toll on all of us, Jason especially, and that toll manifested itself in an unfortunate incident yesterday," added Russell.
Speaking on behalf of the San Diego PD, Lt. Brown also made an announcment. NBC reports she described Russell as acting “very strange,” but when your charges include public masturbation and auto vandalism a few feet from the shores of the Pacific while stumbling incoherently on a Thursday night, that’s pretty much a given.
"He was no problem for the police department, however, during the evaluation we learned that we probably needed to take care of him," Brown explained to the media. "So officers detained him and transferred him to a local medical facility for further evaluation and treatment."
Answering allegations earlier this month that Invisible Children were profiting off of donations assumed to go towards ousting African warlord Joseph Kony, Russell defended the practices of his charity group by saying that their funds are funneled through an array of different endeavors.
"We're an unorthodox organization," Russell said at the time.
http://rt.com/usa/news/kony-2012-arrested-masturbating-777/The blonde-haired, blue-eyed, Christian filmmaker behind the Internet’s most... more
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The Invisible Children campaign #StopKony has been raising awareness about child soldiers in Uganda throughout the week. And whether you are for or against the coverage there is one thing you can be certain about -- the message is missing the gender agenda.
Reintegration is hard for all child soldiers in northern Uganda who were abducted and forced to commit atrocities for insurgents. For girls who also had to marry and have children with rebels, the social rejection can be particularly acute.
The more than two-decade armed conflict between the Ugandan government and rebels with the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) left tens of thousands of people dead and 2 million people displaced in northern Uganda, according to the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, a nonprofit organization.
LRA rebels abducted tens of thousands of children, with estimates by various organizations ranging from 30,000 to 60,000. The rebels forced many of the abducted children to become child soldiers who raped, maimed, tortured and killed.
Although all former child soldiers struggle to reintegrate into the communities where they were once forced to commit atrocities, advocates say that it is the women in northern Uganda, especially those who had children with LRA rebels, who struggle the most.
While contending with community rejection, they must also cope with the traumatizing experiences they endured in captivity. Those include rape, other forms of sexual violence, unwanted pregnancies and combat injuries, according to testimonies of 35 formerly abducted mothers gathered by the Uganda Association of Women Lawyers, an advocacy group. These women have limited access to health facilities and health-related information.
The government and various humanitarian organizations have set up interventions to assist former abductees. But many of the women say that current approaches overlook them, take advantage of them and can't make up for everything they lost.
http://womensenews.org/story/the-world/110916/northern-ugandas-girl-soldiers-find-harsh-homecomingThe Invisible Children campaign #StopKony has been raising awareness about child... more
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Jacob Acaye, the Ugandan former child abductee at the heart of the film Kony 2012, a web phenomenon seen by more than 50 million people around the world, defended the video and its makers on Thursday against criticism that it is misleading and champions western intervention against an insurgency which is already waning and on the run.
Acaye's home region around the town of Gulu is now relatively peaceful, and the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), which kidnapped him and killed his brother in 2002, has been driven out of northern Uganda along with its warlord leader, Joseph Kony, who has melted into the forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic. But Acaye denied widespread criticism in Uganda and elsewhere that the American-made film calling for Kony's arrest is out-of-date or irrelevant. "It is not too late, because all this fighting and suffering is still going on elsewhere," Acaye, now 21, told the Guardian in a telephone interview from Kampala, where he is studying law. "Until now, the war that was going on has been a silent war. People did not really know about it.
"Now what was happening in Gulu is still going on elsewhere in the Central African Republic and in Congo. What about the people who are suffering over there? They are going through what we were going through."
Kony 2012 has become a surprise hit around the world some 25 years after Kony founded his militia and a decade after the peak of its reign of terror in northern Uganda. But its makers, a group called Invisible Children, have been widely criticised by Ugandan journalists and other aid agencies for being self-promoting (the video spends much of its 28 minutes on its maker, Jason Russell and his young son, Gavin) and opaque about its use of funds – and for concentrating on an issue that has dramatically changed in recent years.
"They are focusing more on an American solution to an African conflict than the holistic approach which should include regional governments and people who are very key to make this a success," said Victor Ochen, the director of African Youth Initiative Network based in Lira, the site of one Kony's worst massacres in Uganda.
"They are advocating for a mechanism to end war with more attention to a perpetrator not victims. Campaigning on killing one man and that's the end is not enough … There are many people who are caught up in this war. Invisible Children has good access to international media but they have no connection with the community they claim to represent." Ugandan writer Angelo Opi-Aiya Izama wrote on his blog: "To call the campaign a misrepresentation is an understatement ... its portrayal of his alleged crimes in northern Uganda are from a bygone era." He added that the main problems in the area now are child prostitution, HIV and a mysterious and incurable neurological disorder, known as nodding disease, which has afflicted more than 4,000 children.
Izama said that although the LRA is still preying on civilians in neighbouring countries, it was no longer an unknown problem. He said: "The LRA leader is the subject of an international manhunt by a joint force of Ugandan, Congolese, Sudanese and Central African troops. This effort is assisted by US combat troops."
In 2009 a US-supported military operation dubbed Operation Lightning Thunder and carried out by Uganda government forces failed to kill Kony. The Ugandan army said Kony had left his compound a few minutes before the attack. Since it was set up in 2003, Invisible Children, a San Diego-based charity has released 11 films and run regular "awareness-raising" film tours across the US, mainly showing to schools and universities. The group is barely known in Uganda, but claims to have given school and university scholarships to 750 children, and helped re-build schools. Acaye said that his old school is one of those the group has rebuilt.
"Now that the situation in Gulu is stabilised and there is no longer war there, there is reconstruction of the place. Schools are being built. It is not the fault of the people there that they were abducted and used. They need to be helped," he said. "The organisation has fought really hard to rebuild my school. It is doing good work." Acaye was taken prisoner by the LRA militia when it attacked his home village of Koro, near Gulu, but he escaped after three weeks when one unit handed him over to another.
"I got lucky. I was taken by a second group which did not know much about me, and I was transferred to that group. They asked me how long I had been with the LRA and I said three months so they thought I had no intention of running away, so they did not watch me," Acaye said.
He found his way back to his village, but from then on joined the hundreds of children who walked into Gulu to sleep every night for safety. It was while he was sleeping on a verandah there that he was found by Invisible Children.
"They could not understand what was happening. They wanted a kid who was sleeping there and who spoke English. I could understand English and I could say what was happening, so that is how I was in their film," Acaye said.
Invisible Children's accounts show it is a cash rich operation, which more than tripled its income to $9m (£5.68m) in 2011, mainly from personal donations. Of this, nearly 25% was spent on travel and film-making. Most of the money raised has been spent in the US. The accounts show $1.7m went on US employee salaries, $850,000 in film production costs, $244,000 in "professional services" – thought to be Washington lobbyists – and $1.07m in travel expenses. Nearly $400,000 was spent on offices in San Diego.
Questions were raised on Thursday about its operation after it emerged that Charity Navigator, a US charity evaluator, gave the organisation only three out of four stars overall, four stars financially, and two stars for "accountability and transparency". Noelle Jouglet communication director, responded in a statement saying: "Our score is currently at 2 stars due to the fact that Invisible Children currently does not have five independent voting members on our board of directors. We are currently in the process of interviewing potential board members, and our goal is to add an additional independent member this year in order to regain our 4-star rating by 2013."
Julian Borger, John Vidal, and Rosebell Kagumire in KampalaJacob Acaye, the Ugandan former child abductee at the heart of the film Kony 2012, a... more
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Nothing is more POWERFUL than an IDEA whose time is NOW.
Joseph Kony is one of the world's worst war criminals and we support the international effort to arrest him, disarm the LRA and bring the child soldiers home.
KONY 2012 is a film and campaign by Invisible Children that aims to make Joseph Kony famous, not to celebrate him, but to raise support for his arrest and set a precedent for international justice.Nothing is more POWERFUL than an IDEA whose time is NOW.
Joseph Kony is one of the... more
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4MnpzG5Sqc
KONY 2012 is a film and campaign by Invisible Children that aims to make Joseph Kony famous, not to celebrate him, but to raise support for his arrest and set a precedent for international justice.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4MnpzG5Sqc
KONY 2012 is a film and campaign by... more
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Remember the Pennsylvania pastor who runs a militia in East Africa and is trying to kill Joseph Kony? Well, those movie rumors were true.
Gerard Butler will play Sam Childers, the machine gun preacher himself. Michelle Monaghan will play his wife, and Marc Forster (Quantum of Solace, Monster’s Ball) is directing.
Skeptical as I am of Childers’s methods, this project has potential to bring awareness of Joseph Kony and the LRA to a whole new audience. It’s hard to complain about that. Below is an interview with the man, the inspiration, Reverend Childers.
-Azy
P.s. Doesn’t a movie entitled “Machine Gun Preacher” sound like it should star Samuel L. Jackson?Remember the Pennsylvania pastor who runs a militia in East Africa and is trying to... more
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For those of you watching C-SPAN just now…. we assume you were cheering/crying too!
In the span of one year, we have made history. In April of 2009, 80,000 of us stood in solidarity with the child soldiers trapped in Joseph Kony’s war. In June, we were two-thousand strong on the lawn of Capitol Hill, asking our leaders to consider the LRA Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act. In January of this year, we delivered 253,512 signatures to the State Department in support of Kony’s arrest. Our tenacity, annoying phone calls, hundreds of local office lobby meetings, and certainly our sleeping bag assaults (Oklahoma) paid off and the bill has been passed. Getting a bill passed through Congress is an enormous accomplishment. In the last session of Congress, only 3% of bills introduced were actually passed. We’ve done the impossible.
Now, it goes to President Obama’s desk to be signed into law. We expect him to sign the bill into law within the next 10 days.
Lawwwww. We have made it law to pursue Joseph Kony. Let that sink in.
This is confirmation that young people have a powerful political voice. We have asked our government and our President to pursue Joseph Kony and other top LRA commanders, to disarm and disband his militia, and to restore stability to those areas of Africa that have been terrorized by the LRA. They have heard us, and now we will hold them accountable to their commitment.
Our generation has become educated and empowered in the quest to resolve this conflict. While American intervention in foreign conflicts is always complicated and often discouraged, we believe in the moral mandate of the international community to come to the aid of the most vulnerable peoples in the world. There are none more vulnerable than abducted children forced to be soldiers in a region ill-equipped to protect them. We are not advocating international meddling. We are asking our leadership to respond to this unique crisis of conscience with the strategic expertise and capability unique to our nation. This is an entirely solvable conflict. In the aftermath of Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Darfur, it is with our generation’s united voice that we proclaim national self interest is no longer our only priority.
We celebrate this victory with our partners Resolve: Uganda and Enough Project, and now we must pressure the Obama Administration to follow through on this important mandate, to set a precedent for justice, and to protect these children who have too long been trapped in a war against their will. We will see them come home.
Fist pumps and aggressive status updates with too many exclamation points are encouraged. (sorry news feed… making history wins)
Sincerely!!!!!!!!!!!!
Invisible Children.For those of you watching C-SPAN just now…. we assume you were cheering/crying... more
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Sign up [@link] and we will mail you a "When the Night Comes" DVD and Night of Nets resources for creating awareness, raising resources (just $6 provides a life-saving bednet!), and effective advocacy on your campus, church, or community.
also visit for more info:
http://www.whenthenightcomes.com/Sign up [@link] and we will mail you a "When the Night Comes" DVD and Night... more
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Hulu gave Invisible Children free advertising space. We are stoked for the exposure that will come from it.Hulu gave Invisible Children free advertising space. We are stoked for the exposure... more
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The LRA Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act was unanimously passed through the Senate this afternoon!
This is what we have been working so hard for. This is proof that the 262 hours of holding out was worth it. Thank you to everyone who lobbied your senators this past year. Thank you to everyone who held out.
But it’s not over. We still have to get it through the House of Representatives and through the White House. Let’s celebrate this victory and get geared up for the next hurdles
story continues at link.The LRA Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act was unanimously passed through... more
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The Ugandan community has had the LONGEST RUNNING WAR in Africa and is STILL not resovled. Three filmmakers, from Southern California decided to embark on a trip to Africa to create a documentary of the war. When they arrived, they realized the war was much bigger then they expected. It dealt with child soldiers being kidnapped, becoming killers and being killed themselves because of ONE MAN and ONE MAN ONLY... Joseph Kony, the leader of a rebel army known as The Lord's Resistance Army or The LRA. These three filmmakers: Jason Russell, Bobby Bailey and Laren Poole, decided to take matters into their own hands and formed a non-profit organization called Invisible Children. These three young hopefules have created over three films, in hopes of catching people's attention and create awarness on what's going on in Uganda today. With the help of people like you and me, IC has successfully caught the attention of government officials worldwide and media icons including Oprah. Please watch the informative video/documentary that I have created above, with an overview on what Invisible Children entails, including rallys IC has conducted, as well as a brief history on the war in Uganda. All information and pictures are courtesy of InvisibleChildren.com. I as well am an aspiring journalist, broadcaster and producer. Thanks for watching! :)The Ugandan community has had the LONGEST RUNNING WAR in Africa and is STILL not... more
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THE army has captured another senior LRA commander in the on-going military push against the rebels in the DR Congo and the Central African Republic.
Mickman Opuk, who was close to LRA leader Joseph Kony, was captured from the jungles of the Central African Republic a fortnight ago as the joint military offensive pursued a group of rebels.
“We picked him like a grasshopper and he is intact,” said army spokesperson Lt. Col. Felix Kulayigye yesterday. “Our forces had been in hot pursuit of Kony’s group which he was part of.”THE army has captured another senior LRA commander in the on-going military push... more
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The six-year war between forces loyal to Sudan's government and rebels in Darfur has effectively ended, the UN's military commander in the region says.
General Martin Agwai, who is leaving his post this week, said the vicious fighting of earlier years had subsided as rebel groups split into factions.
He says the region now suffers more from low-level disputes and banditry.
The UN says 300,000 people have died in Darfur, but the Sudanese government puts the figure at 10,000.
Almost three million people are said to have been displaced by the fighting.
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The end of displaced children and child soldiers is soon. There is more hope now more than ever to do so. Next is the end of the longest running war in Africa and justice to Joseph Kony.The six-year war between forces loyal to Sudan's government and rebels in Darfur... more
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**invisible children make THE best videos
Amazing footage of The Rescue from all 100 cities**invisible children make THE best videos
Amazing footage of The Rescue from all 100... more
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Bobby Bailey of invisible Children takes to congress leading up to The Rescue event on April 25, 2009 to ask, WILL IT WORK?
The event was the efforts of thousands around the world in 100 cities abducting themselves representing the many that are abducted still by Joseph Kony's Lords Resistance Army and camped out til we were rescued by a mogul, whether it be important people in the media or congress.
We abducted ourselves so the media and people of the western world know; we abducted ourselves to alert our governments of the need to end one of the longest running atrocities known to mankind; and we abducted ourselves for the children who are still away from their homes and in dyer need to be RESCUED.
howitends.tv
invisiblechildren.comBobby Bailey of invisible Children takes to congress leading up to The Rescue event on... more
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