If you’d like to toss a few bucks toward some folks who had little and now have nothing, this would be a good time.

I’ve never been to Java, but in my one brief visit elsewhere in Indonesia I was treated with more friendliness than I knew how to react to.  (Some of this, no doubt, was because I was a relatively well-off tourist, and thus a possible source of income, granted.  But I do think a great deal of it was just general human decency.)

If you’d like to show a little general human decency of your own, my favorite charity for times like this is Doctors Without Borders. If you’d prefer a range of choices, I’ve also posted a list of almost a dozen highly reputable ones—all currently active in helping out the people of Yogyakarta—over at my own site.  You can scope these out, or go find others via the Charity Navigator site, and find out more—including videos and photos—at the Indonesia Help Blog.

General human decency is a pretty cool thing.

Let’s use some.

PS — if you see some exceptionally oddball post atop my site about sensitive teeth or goat herding, the guys who maintain my site are tinkering around behind the scenes and occasionally check site performance by briefly posting some random text.

The disturbing thing is that these snips of completely random text are as entertaining in their own way as my own posts.

PPS — Alert reader Jim points out correctly that Charity Navigator, by itself, isn’t a sufficient indicator of whether a charity can be trusted. It currently gives four stars to Operation Blessing.

Well, crap. So much for Charity Navigator.

For those who came in late, Operation Blessing is closely aligned with Pat Robertson, the man of questionable god who claims to be able to leg press 2000 pounds while calling for the killing of foreign leaders he doesn’t like. I like to imagine that in private he does these both at the same time.

In the past, Operation Blessing aircraft have been used in a for-profit mining venture under the benevolent eye of Mobuto Sese Seko, the Saddam-plus genocide-supporting scumbag who used to run Zaire. This is when Pat wasn’t occupied with his other hobby, a similar mining venture in cooperation with Liberian dictator Charles Taylor, now awaiting trial on a 650-count indictment for war crimes.

Which leads me to ask: WGWCWJGIAMVW? (What Genocidal War Criminal Would Jesus Go Into A Mining Venture With?) Perhaps there should be bumper stickers. And HMCJLP (How Much Could Jesus Leg Press), anyway?

The single biggest recipient of gifts from Operation Blessing in 2004? According to the New York Daily News, it was Pat Robertson’s own TV operation.

My best guess is that the Charity Navigator people just don’t know all this; they seem to be mostly concerned with number-crunching the efficiency of charities in converting donations into throughput. This would seem a decent enough system for detecting internal wastefulness, but not so robust for picking up on—putting it politely—closed-loop fundraising.

So, donor beware. Do not just rely on the Charity Navigator, sad to say. I considered it a helpful tool. I suppose it probably still is. But not by itself. My bad.

For what it’s worth, however, bottom line: some nice folks in Indonesia are still screwed, and they still need our help; the vast majority of charities are actually charities, so don’t go all cynical; and I’m personally happy to give money to the specific charities I’ve listed, at least. If that means anything.