graduatedTaste

I promised myself I’d never write life-hackish articles on here, but this trick I came up with by myself. A stroke of genius that most likely many before me have figured out already. I just implemented this filter and it has worked wonders on my Gmail account, filtering out all the unecessary mail with a very low amount of false positives. Here are the steps:

1. Find all email with the word “unsubscribe” in the text
2. Archive it, label it, and read it later

I’ve found that with marketing emails, it’s generally required that you have a way to opt-out of the service. The magic word here is “unsubscribe,” invariably used by mailers. This is the word that you don’t normally see in high value emails either.

So try it out, run a test search, and see how many false positives you get. I didn’t find any for 6 months back.

As said before, I believe that cute little tips like these generally take up more time implementing than time saved, but this one helped me out.

I love politics, but I hate bad sources.

My last 2 cents….

Obama has multiple ties with terrorist nations both in his family (http://www.anobamanation.net/2008/08/obamas-terrorist-connections.html) and supporting his campaign (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1955258/posts – http://noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/02/15/obamas-terrorist-ties/)

That is just two of many articles written about known terrorists that Obama has been known to associate with… and don’t even get me started on Jeremiah Wright http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6326036317339180920&ei=c6ClSODFJ4Lo4QK9npkc&q=anti+Obama&vt=lf&hl=en

Well I took those claims and looked around. Your first source that claims he has family ties with terrorists. I went to the site and it says that Obama’s half brother’s wife’s uncle is a founding member of Hamas. Doing a Google search of this link only brings up the site that you mentioned, with no newspapers or other sources bringing it up. So you have a blog telling you that Obama is 4 degrees away from Hamas, and his source is from “Pablo’s blog” on redblueamerica.

Except it has been irrefutably proven that the claimed half brother, the first link in this chain, is not so. Ralia Odinga, the Prime Minister of Kenya, is the supposed half-brother. Obama’s father belonged to the same tribe as Odinga, but they are not blood relatives. You can Wiki his name for the source.

All other claims from this op-ed can be refuted in the same way.

The next problem is campaign contributions. The first source you cite comes from freerepublic.com, a conservative/nationalist forum, so there’s going to be some bias and little authority. The “terrorist” that funded Obama’s campaign is an activist named Jodie Evans, who is associated with “Code Pink,” an anti-war activist group. The article goes on to claim that Code Pink financially supports terrorists. While this group may be a bunch of dicks, that doesn’t make them terrorists. Fortunately we have a government structure that protects citizen’s political views, whatever they may be.

The second source comes from noquarterusa.net. The bias is apparent on first glance and should be noted. The source they refer to actually comes from Bloomberg News, which gives it more quality; however, the article seems to have disappeared from Bloomie’s website. Further analysis shows that the original source came from the London Daily Mail, a British tabloid.

The person mentioned is William Ayers, former member of Weather Underground and now professor of education and U of Illinois-Chicago. If he is a terrorist, then UIC needs to be shut down for financially supporting a terrorist.

The fact is that in 2001 Ayers gave a $200 contribution to an Obama re-election fund for Illinois Senate. When Ayers was a member of the Weathermen, Obama was 8. The connection is a stretch, and the accusation quickly died out at the end of April. It’s no longer a campaign issue and should not be used to test the mettle of a Presidential candidate.

The fact is accepting political contributions from a person do not mean that you accept their politics. And it doesn’t mean you have to give their money back. Ron Paul had the same issue when he recieved monies from members of Nazi groups and did not give it back. He simply said that he will take their money and use it for things they were actively working against.

And then there’s Jeremiah Wright. He’s a hack; a pharisee. He uses religion to gain political clout. But a politician’s association with a minister should not be used as an attack on him. If we were to continue along these lines, we could then look at Republican leaders and their association with preachers such as Falwell, Robertson, and Hagee. Remember, Hagee has officially endorsed McCain, and also said that Hurricane Katrina was a curse on New Orleans because of Southern Decadence.

But to have that qualify a presidential candidate is silly. Why not look at policy- domestic, foreign, and fiscal. Why not see who each candidate chooses to be in their cabinet and their veep.

But the media likes noise like this. It gets ratings, and the ratings are good.