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How do you decide where your money should go? Your email inbox is filled every day with groups and/or people you don’t know claiming to be your friends who vitally need your money RIGHT NOW to stop the apocalypse and you really want to help — but there are SO MANY of them!

How do you choose? Will you be to blame for the rise of fascism (from either right or left, red or blue) if your money goes the wrong way?

It’s tempting to donate tiny amounts to each supplicant or a lump sum to just one. But do you feel good about that? Have you made the difference you so deeply desire?

There’s also the nagging and queasy feeling that whatever paltry amount you can afford to donate won’t make a real difference, so what’s the point? Maybe you should be saving your money for when the inevitable tornado/earthquake/lava flow finally gets here. You don’t want to be a burden on others when society shatters.

Calm down. Breathe. Have a drink if you’re so inclined. There are solutions to this dilemma.

My favorite is to pass the burden on to someone else. This will save you stress and also make it appear that you’re a thoughtful, caring person even if you’re being perfectly selfish. All you have to do is find occasions — birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, graduations, dog adoption days, Mondays — and then send gifts in the form of donation gift certificates.

You take care of your gift-giving and your donating, and you don’t have to rack your brain coming up with a real thoughtful gift or the right cause. You get other people to choose the causes for you. You also build up goodwill so that if the apocalypse arrives your recipients will be more likely to let you in their houses.

Just be careful who your friends are.

Meaty issue. Examine this photo:

Do you think this package contains meat? Do you have any doubt in your mind on this issue?

Obviously, no product with a drawing of a guy with a dandy moustache and hypnotic eyes could possibly contain anything as basic as hamburger. There’s also that ribbon thing that says “100% vegan.”

Anyone confused by this product probably is confused by many things in life.

So I have no explanation for yet another dispute over labeling of non-meat and the need for laws to protect meat’s identity.

A company called Upton’s Naturals Co., the maker of the product pictured above, and the Plant Based Foods Association have felt the need to sue the governor of Oklahoma and the Oklahoma Commissioner of Agriculture over a new law that requires fake meat producers to enlarge the size of meat “disclaimers” to the size of the largest text on their labels.

Says the suit filed in federal court in Oklahoma: “There is no legitimate reason for this oversized-warning requirement, which treats Plaintiffs’ healthy products like cigarettes or alcohol.”

According to the complaint, meat lobbyists, including the Oklahoma Cattlemen’s Association and the Oklahoma Pork Council, got the state legislature to pass the law to protect them from competition. For some reason the Plant Based Foods Association didn’t have the same kind of clout.

Those of you with eidetic memories will recall a similar suit in Missouri a couple of years ago. Missouri’s law barred misrepresentation of products as meat.

I suppose it may be that heavy meat-eating dulls the senses.

Opening sentence of the week. The following is the first sentence, in quotes, from a Texas federal judge’s ruling last week: “Christmas may not bring a single thing; still, it gives me a song to sing.”

It can also give you litigation.

The dispute, in case you’re wondering, was over whether a Christmas caroling company — a type of entity I didn’t know existed — infringed copyrights owned by a rival Christmas caroling company.

I don’t know who’s in the right here but I do have questions.

Is there such a huge market for Christmas caroling that it’s worth suing over?

Aren’t there more than enough audiences for two groups of carolers?

Is money what Christmas is all about?

Ok, that’s a dumb question.

Ironic headline of the week: “Students at the Costliest MBA Programs Have Buyer’s Remorse.”

Apparently they learned something in those business classes.

Categories / Op-Ed