How about Charities?
To give or not to give, is that the question? Actually, more questions arise.
A good meme for most charities. Seriously: when I was a child, I thought snake oil was against snakes!
There is an old joke about the sucker cop and the little boy that can easily apply to those who donate to charities:
This little boy is standing at the corner, apparently selling something. The cop goes over to him and asks him,
“What are you selling?”
“Cherry seeds.”
“What are they good for?”
“The make people smarter!”
“How much are they?”
“Two for ten.”
“Give me one.”
The cop walks away and returns after a few minutes,
“Little boy, you have cheated me! For five dollars I could have gotten a full pound of cherries.”
“You see, Sir, Officer, you are already smarter!”
Before donating to a charity, you might want to check out whom you are about to support:
There are less palatable options whose focus is on profits on the Stock Market:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/williampbarrett/2018/12/11/charities-to-donate/
The following site is proud of being the most extensive such site, which might make you wonder, where its money comes from (hint: scroll to the bottom of the page; they give themselves away with their links):
https://www.charitynavigator.org/
For me, charities are limited to the Salvation Army and the girl scouts (a daughter was one for several years) , which I leave there, because I don’t eat them; in case you are a married man, I have my wife’s full consent.
The overwhelming majority of non-profits, mostly posing as “charities,” are only ripping people off. Most of them spend tax-deductible contributions on paying their CEOs and the like, while others, especially the Gates and Melinda Foundation or the Clinton’s, are used for money laundering as well as conspicuously sinister purposes (Gates is now accused of criminal application of his “vaccines” in Africa and in India, but his GMO seeds to starving African countries were also meant to increased starvation by cross-pollinating local harvests so that the country would have to buy the next batch of infertile GMO seeds from Gates and his cronies), often with several ulterior motives. Of course, any non-profit receiving major contribution can be automatically branded as part of the current system, where consumers are treated as bovines, left to themselves to ruminate over their nonsensical deeds.
What I absolutely can’t stand is anything that has to do anything with “children’s cancer,” because current cancer treatments only experiment on people, ripping off their insurance and sell their diagnostics, surgically-removed organs (fetuses included) and tissues acquired from biopsies. Basically, as long as your insurance lasts, you are a cash cow, and after it runs out, you become a lab rat, while never losing your status as a cash cow.
What is the best charity? Whenever I’m asked for money, my stock response is, “When I want to support people in need, I do that to friends and family, and I don’t have the means to go beyond that.”
In many “communities,” your donation keeps the leader(s) alive and well, while not much is left for the members, which strangely resembles the way some trade unions function, but that is a topic for another article.
US tax collection is based on”voluntary compliance.” Is the IRS a charity?
Thank you Ray. Apparently "snake oil salesmen" came from the new, emerging Rockefeller medicine industry, to discredit the "peddlers" of natural solutions.