Three Charities You Can Help by Helping Yourself

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It’s the time of year for giving, so give!

At the end of the year, many non-profit organizations make their year-end plea for funds. They know the same thing deduction-savvy taxpayers know: a donation before year-end can get you a write-off on April 15th.

In general, I prefer educational charities over other types. (For obvious reasons, I don’t give to religious charities, although I did donate to Non-Believers Giving Aid right after the disaster in Haiti.) I think it’s important to keep quality information flowing from the folks who can create it to the folks who can benefit from it. That’s why I suggest the following three charitable organizations if you’re interested in making year-end contributions to charities that directly benefit you and your family:

  • NPR LogoNPR (National Public Radio) had its semiannual pledge drive last week. I caught the tail end of it while driving to do errands, but never got around to picking up the phone. That’s a shame because they often have matching funds during fund drives, so my $50 donation can get my local NPR affiliate $100. Still, I’ll send my contribution by visiting the Support Public Radio page on its Web site. NPR, if you’re not aware, airs a wide variety of radio programming, from talk shows about current events and science to comedy and music. Even if you don’t listen in on the radio, you can subscribe to podcasts for most shows. And if you listen in more than one listening area — for example, I listen in Washington State during the summer months and Phoenix in the winter months — consider splitting your contribution between both of the radio stations you listen to.
  • PBS LogoPBS (Public Broadcasting Service) is similar to NPR in that it airs a lot of educational and thought-provoking content. From Sesame Street to NOVA, from FRONTLINE to Masterpiece, these are the folks who teach and entertain us with something more substantial than the latest incarnation of CSI and Dancing with the Stars. Although you can donate during a pledge drive and receive a “gift,” you don’t need to wait for a pledge drive to donate. (Seriously: do you really need another tote bag?)
  • Wikipedia LogoWikipedia is the online encyclopedia. Say what you will about its accuracy, but you can’t deny that it’s one of the best free sources around for general information about any subject at all. These days, you can’t visit a Wikipedia page without seeing “an urgent appeal” from Jimmy Wales. That’s because it costs a ton of money to run those Web servers. If you use Wikipedia — and who doesn’t? — why not send a little cash their way? Yes, it is tax-deductible in the U.S.

These are the ones on my list. If you think about it, you’ll probably come up with others that might be more meaningful to you and your family. These are organizations that enhance your life and help round out your knowledge. Don’t they deserve your support?

Take a moment and send a little cash their way. It doesn’t matter how much or how little — even $20 can help, especially when hundreds of people just like you send the same.

And remember the added bonus of a tax deduction in April.

Shop Green this Christmas

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Shop locally or online, reuse, recycle.

Wrapped GiftChristmas can be one of the most wasteful times of the year. For most people, it involves a lot of driving around from store to store; getting stuck in traffic; cruising parking lots for the best spot at the mall; buying gifts recipients probably won’t like (and hence, have to return with even more mall visits); covering gifts in rolls of colored paper with ribbons and bows that will soon be discarded; driving to parties here, there, and everywhere; cooking more food than what can be eaten before it goes bad; etc., etc. And let’s not even get started on the light shows that too many people erect. Seriously: Is it that important for your house to be seen from space?

I know: it’s all part of the tradition of Christmas. I wouldn’t dream of making substantial changes in it — I really don’t need to add the receipt of hate mail to my working day.

But I do want to suggest looking at with the thought of reducing wastefulness related to shopping. And that’s what this post, prompted in part by “I’m Dreaming of a Green Christmas” by Siân Berry in The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas, is all about.

If You Can, Shop Locally

In a perfect world, you’d be able to walk “downtown” in your city with a bunch of canvas shopping bags, visit a handful of shops where the owners or clerks knew you by name, and leave with all your shopping done.

I remember that perfect world from when I was a kid. My sister and I would do most of our Christmas shopping in Cresskill’s local pharmacy — Scofield’s — which also sold perfumes and other small gift items. (I distinctly remember buying my father a tie there once.) They knew us, we knew them. It was a bike ride away and we could bring home the goods in our bike baskets. Later, when we got older, we’d ride our bikes to Bergenfield, where they had a lot more shops and options.

Those days are just about gone. Downtowns have been mostly killed off by malls and superstores like Walmart. Gift recipients in this high tech age expect the kind of merchandise not available at the local Hallmark shop. But if you live somewhere with a vibrant downtown area, try hard to shop there. Not only will you be supporting local merchants and the economic viability of your town, but you’ll keep your carbon footprint a lot lower than if you started driving around to the malls.

If You Can’t Shop Locally, Shop Online

Sadly shopping locally is not an option for me. But you couldn’t pay me to step foot in a mall in December.

This year (and most other years), I did 90% of my holiday shopping online and had gifts shipped directly to recipients. I also received 90% of my gifts by USPS and UPS, shipped directly from stores like Amazon.com. In most cases, the gifts I purchased (and assume received; I haven’t opened them yet) are items that I wanted — items that appeared on a personal wish list at the online store in which they were bought.

There are two benefits for shopping online with wish lists:

  • You are absolutely certain to get the recipient exactly what he or she wanted. No disappointments, no pretending to like gifts. Best of all: no returns.
  • Convenience. What could be easier than going online, clicking a few links and buttons, and entering payment information?

What most people might not think about is that shopping online is actually “greener” than making several trips to the mall. Sure, all these items need to be shipped to their recipients, but the shipping services are making the rounds anyway. Face it: UPS is going to visit Wickenburg twice a day on weekdays whether its trucks are filled or not. I’m actually reducing greenhouse gases by helping to fill their trucks instead of by hopping in my car and making the 80-mile round trip trek to the nearest mall by myself. And by having gifts shipped directly to the recipients, I don’t waste time, money, packaging materials, and greenhouse gases to ship them twice.

Shipping BoxHere’s a tip: if you’re flying out to visit family or friends, ship the gifts there with instructions not to open them. Then, when you arrive, sort through the gifts and wrap them for that big moment. Or skip the wrapping; who says “wrapping” can’t be cardboard shipping boxes?

Ordering Online? Recycle those Packing Materials!

I’m sure my family is not the only one to recognize the convenience of shopping online to get gift recipients exactly what they want. As a result, there’s a lot of cardboard boxes, packing peanuts, bubble wrap, and plastic airbags shuffling around.

Depending on where you live, you might not need to throw all that stuff away. I have three choices for dealing with packing materials:

  • Reuse it. I keep a very large plastic bag in my garage which I fill with bubble wrap, foam, and those plastic airbags. I have another smaller bag I use for packing peanuts. I also keep a few select size boxes. Then, when I need to pack something to ship it out, I have all the free packing materials I need. Not only does this save money, but by reusing materials, I’m keeping them out of landfills and recycling centers.
  • Hand it off to someone else who will reuse it. In Wickenburg, one of our shipping centers, Kaley’s, welcomes clean used boxes and packing material. So when my huge bag of bubble wrap or smaller bag of packing peanuts gets full enough to start a new bag, I take the filled bag to Kaley’s and they use it to pack items for their customers. It’s easy to find someone to take these things if they’re clean and neatly packaged up. Heck, I was in Page, AZ for a few weeks this past autumn and wound up with two big bags of packing peanuts — I brought them to the nearest gift shop with a “We Ship” sign on the window and they were thrilled to get them.
  • Recycle. If you don’t have the room to store these materials, know you won’t need them, or have no one to hand them off to, take them to the recycling center. In most cases, they only thing they’ll want are the boxes, which must be broken down. That means you’ll need to discard the other packing materials, filling landfills with material that may take forever to break down. (But have you really tried hard enough to find a home for them?)

And, of course, you should always recycle the wrapping paper and other recyclable materials that are part of Christmas. In my home, we actually recycle more than we throw away.

How Else Can You Make Christmas Greener?

If you’re interested in this, I highly recommend “I’m Dreaming of a Green Christmas” by Siân Berry for some really great tips. But I’m sure you can come up with some ideas on your own. Just think about what’s wasteful and reduce that waste. If everyone did just a little, it would make a big difference.

And possibly the best part about all this is that when you reduce waste, you’re likely saving money, too.

Have a great Christmas holiday!

The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas

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Remarkable reading for the holidays!

The Atheist's Guide to ChristmasA month or more ago, someone on Twitter tweeted a link to the Kindle version of The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas for just $1. Like a lot of people, I consider a buck “why not?” money for anything that interests me. I followed the link and downloaded the book. It sat on my iPad for a while, half forgotten.

Sometime later, while I was eating alone in a restaurant in Phoenix, I cracked the cover (so to speak) and began reading it. It wasn’t at all as I expected. It was so much better.

You see, I expected some sort of anti-religious rant against Christmas and everything concerned with it. Not sure why I expected this — perhaps it’s got something to do with the conservative media’s perceived “war against Christmas” that crops up every year here in the U.S. If you believe the conservatives on FoxNews, etc., anyone who is not Christian hates Christmas and wants to destroy it. Following that line of reason, the folks who should hate it most are atheists, since they don’t believe in any religious doctrines at all.

But that’s not what this book was all about.

The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas is a collection of 42 stories and essays from a variety of atheist scientists, comedians, philosophers, and writers. They include reminiscences (eg., Phil Plait’s “Starry, Starry Night”), celebration suggestions (eg., Josie Long’s “Things to Make and Do at Christmas”), scientific information (eg., Brian Cox’s The Large Hadron Collider: A scientific Creation Story”), historical information (eg., Claire Rayner’s “How to Have a Peaceful Pagan Christmas”), and tall tales (eg., Nick Doody’s “How to Understand Christmas: A Scientific Overview”).

Sure, there was the takeoff on Jeeves and Wooster by Richard Dawkins in which Woofter and Jarvis engage in a conversation about the existence of God, Jesus’s part in the Holy Trinity, and bible inconsistencies. But that was just one small chapter in a very large book. Most of the book is very positive and uplifting, encouraging non-believers to enjoy the Christmas season the way most believers do: with decorations, big meals, gift giving, and gatherings of friends and family members.

The book makes it clear that you don’t need to believe in God or religious doctrines to enjoy a holiday that just happens to coincide with the winter solstice. (Not exactly a coincidence, but try to explain that to a believer.) It also offers plenty of helpful tips and advice for getting along with believers during a holiday that may have some serious religious significance to them.

I’m about halfway through the book — although I do admit that I began reading by using the interactive table of contents to pick and choose among the essays I wanted to read first. While some chapters are better than others as far as their relevance to my personal thoughts about Christmas, I’m certain that any atheist would find something of value in its pages. Likewise, I don’t think any believers would be offended by its contents. As the book’s introduction states, The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas is an “atheist book it’s safe to leave around your granny.” Indeed, I’m certain that even believers would find a lot of content in this book to help make their Christmas celebrations more enjoyable — without threatening their beliefs.

The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas was edited by Ariane Sherine and published by Friday Books. All book royalties are donated to charity — how’s that for the spirit of Christmas giving?

Spam is Spam

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Don’t try to advertise your products and services on my blog.

June 30, 2014 Update
I’ve finally gotten around to writing up the site comment policy on a regular page (rather than post) on this site. You can find it here: Comment Policy.

For some reason lately, my blog — and many others, I’ve heard — has been attracting a much larger than usual amount of comment spam. Comment spam — in case you’re not familiar with the term — is an attempt by spammers to incorporate links to products, services, or Web sites they’re trying to promote in the comments on blog posts. Smart bloggers use spam filters like Akismet (which I use) to separate the obvious spam from what might be legitimate comments. Some bloggers let everything that their spam filter doesn’t catch get published to their blog, but I don’t. I review and approve every single comment. This is all laid out in my site’s comment policy.

This site attracts, on average, about 100 spam comments a day. Lately, that number has quadrupled. On another one of my sites, Maria’s Guides, spam has increased tenfold. Apparently, there’s a new spam tool available for spammers. But Akismet has me covered.

Akismet, unfortunately, doesn’t catch all spam. One or two spam comments slip through each day. I dutifully delete them — or, more accurately, mark them as spam so Akismet will recognize them as such in the future — even if they appear to have been manually entered by a real person. (Most comment spam is entered automatically by spamming software.)

What some people don’t seem to understand is that my blog does not exist as a platform for them to advertise their goods and services — especially if those goods and services compete with mine. What can people possibly be thinking if they attempt to advertise their helicopter charter service or computer how-to book on a blog post that talks about my service or book? Do they think that I spend hours every week building a platform for their advertising? I don’t.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not discouraging comments here. I’m just asking readers to think about their comment before adding it:

  • Is it on topic? Most spam is not.
  • Does it add to the conversation, and thus, to the value of the blog to other readers? A comment written solely to advertise a product or service rarely adds to the conversation. And yes, it is possible to mention and discuss a product or service without it being an advertisement.
  • Does it provide information about products and services that compete with the blog author’s business? You can’t honestly expect a blogger to allow comments that would reduce his or her ability to earn a living.

If the answer to any of these questions is NO, don’t post it. You’re wasting your time since it’ll never appear here.

And here’s a tip: you’re far more likely to have a comment containing product or service information accepted here if you’re a regular commenter.

If your first comment here simply presents information about a product or service, it’s all to obvious to me that your sole purpose for posting it is to spam my blog. Don’t waste your time. It only takes me a second to click the Spam button.