Use Gmail’s Filters to Make Sure Important Emails Aren’t Labeled Spam

I use Google’s email service Gmail on the web using the Chrome browser on a Windows PC. If you figure out how to do a similar procedure with your email service/client combination or you want to collaborate to figure out how, contact me. I’d like to learn how to fix this problem with other services.

There are many reasons why legitimate email messages are marked as Spam (in some services, “Bulk”). At the same time, you probably don’t want to reduce the senisitivity of your Spam filters because there are many more illegitimate emails you don’t want to see in your inbox.

“Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator” Ignores the Rot in the Roman Republic, and Its Analogy to Contemporary Politics Is Flawed

^{Andonis Anthony as the Roman emperor Photograph: Laurence Cendrowicz/Laurence Cendrowicz/BBC Studios}

Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator is a 3-episode series available on United States Public Broadcasting. The docudrama’s contemporary commentators portray Julius Caesar as an ambitious aspiring ruler who masks himself with populism to attract supporters. It portrays Cato as a principled defender of the Roman Republic. Other characters like Cicero and Brutus and Marc Anthony are assessed in their fidelity (or lack thereof) to Caesar and Cato.

Is Facebook not Showing Political Posts in Your Feed? Try adjusting some settings.

I noticed that my Facebook feed was filled with content from sources I don’t follow, and posts from sources I do follow didn’t show up. So I changed some settings, and now I like my feed better. These screenshots and instructions are based on using Facebook using a PC browser.

From Home Screen of Facebook, click on the downward pointing arrow in the lower right hand of the circle with your profile picture. This reveals a menu. Select “Settings & Privacy.” This reveals a second menu. Select “Feed.” Then select the “Reduce” option.

You will go through each of the options in Reduce, and select the least reduction possible. In other words, you want more “low-quality content,” more “unoriginal content and problematic sharing,” more “sensitive content” and less “content reduced by fact-checking.”

Let me know if this worked for you.

P.S. I manage several Facebook Pages. Apparently, in addition to your personal profile, each of your pages’ profiles has its own feed settings which can be updated the same way.

Review: “Kiss the Ground: How the Food You Eat Can Reverse Climate Change, Heal Your Body & Ultimately Save Our World” by Josh Tickell

Carbon capture is advanced as a technology for humans to avoid the worst impacts of anthropocentric climate change. Author Josh Tickell claims that regenerative agriculture is the best way to capture carbon and methane, and, moreover, it is absolutely necessary to prevent desertification and pollution and maintain the food production necessary to feed all of the humans on the planet.

I first heard about regenerative agriculture from a documentary currently available on Netflix entitled Kiss the Ground.

Make Sure Your Twitter Searches Include Sensitive Content

Mohammad Fadel, my brother and Twitter (X) user @shanfaraa, asked if his account was shadow-banned or restricted. I happened to be at a computer where another person has a Twitter account. Using a Chrome browser on a Windows 10 machine, I used the Twitter search bar to search for “shanfaraa”. I printed out as PDF files the “Top,” “Live” and “People” tabs from the results. The URLs for each of these are https://twitter.com/search?q=shanfaraa&src=typed_query, https://twitter.com/search?q=shanfaraa&src=typed_query&f=live & https://twitter.com/search?q=shanfaraa&src=typed_query&f=user, respectively. You will observe that no Twitter status updates by @shanfaraa appear in these results, and even his profile doesn’t appear in the “People” tab.

Be Like Bill Furlong, Not Ivan Ilych

Most of us in life are like Leo Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilych.

Even when [Ivan Ilych] was at the School of Law he was just what he remained for the rest of his life: a capable, cheerful, good-natured, and sociable man, though strict in the fulfillment of what he considered to be his duty: and he considered his duty to be what was so considered by those in authority. Neither as a boy nor as a man was he a toady, but from early youth was by nature attracted to people of high station as a fly is drawn to the light, assimilating their ways and views of life and establishing friendly relations with them. All the enthusiasms of childhood and youth passed without leaving much trace on him; he succumbed to sensuality, to vanity, and finally, in the upper classes, to liberalism, but always within limits which his instinct unfailingly indicated to him as correct. At school he had done things which had formerly seemed to him very horrid and made him feel disgusted with himself when he did them; but when later on he saw that such actions were done by people of good position and that they did not regard them as wrong, he was able not exactly to regard them as right, but to forget about them entirely or not be at all troubled at remembering them. … In the province he had an affair with a lady who made advances to the elegant young lawyer, and there was also a milliner; and there were carousals with aides-de-camp who visited the district, and after-supper visits to a certain outlying street of doubtful reputation; and there was too some obsequiousness to his chief and even to his chief’s wife, but all this was done with such a tone of good breeding that no hard names could be applied to it. It all came under the heading of the French saying: Il faut que jeunesse se passe. It was all done with clean hands, in clean linen, with French phrases, and above all among people of the best society and consequently with the approval of people of rank.

Excerpts from Chapter 2 of Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych.

No spoilers. Don’t be lazy. Go read Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. Its protagonist is Bill Furlong. Then think about your life and the decisions Ivan Ilych & Bill Furlong would make.

“I came to the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) and he (peace be upon him) said, ‘You have come to ask about righteousness.’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He (peace be upon him) said, ‘Consult your heart. Righteousness is that about which the soul feels at ease and the heart feels tranquil. And wrongdoing is that which wavers in the soul and causes uneasiness in the breast, even though people have repeatedly given their legal opinion [in its favour].'”

Hadith 27 in the collection “40 Hadith Nawawi”

Coverage of Escaped Prisoner is More Proof that Mainstream “Liberal” Media is All About Entertainment & Propaganda

A family member regularly watches CNN, so I hear snippets. For weeks now, a frequent news item has been Danelo Cavalcante’s escape from a jail in Pennsylvania and the attempts by law enforcement to apprehend him.

Screenshot of results from search of CNN.com, 2023-Sep-13

Aside from the danger the prisoner poses to his targets, what is the purpose of a national news outlet covering this story? It’s a curious feature of coverage of crime and policing: as it increases, the more money politicians send and the more people think we’re in some kind of dystopian Escape from New York hellhole.

Could a frog die from heat crossing a driveway?

Warning: this post includes pictures of a dead animal.

On July 21, 2023, at 4 pm in Columbia County, Georgia, I noticed a dead frog on a driveway. The frog didn’t have any indicators of trauma (squished by a car, for example.) The weather wasn’t particularly hot.

If you don’t like the film “Cocaine Bear,” we probably wouldn’t have been friends in the 1980s

I subscribed to Peacock TV so that I could add its French Open 2023 coverage to my Tennis Channel Plus coverage. Fortuitiously, it included Cocaine Bear (2023), and it combined the best elements of 1980s coming-of-age, slasher, stoner and drug crime movies.

James Loewen’s “Lies Across America” Should Inspire Local Public History Projects

I’ve been listening to James Loewen‘s Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong using my public library’s subscription to Hoopla Digital. Listening to it, I wonder how Professor Loewen, who passed in 2021, ever slept at night knowing the scale of injustice society perpetuated and the mountain of indifference society placed in the path of restoration of rights and acknowledgement of historical harm. Of course, no single person or small group or set of books can accomplish these things, but a large number of individuals, small groups and publications can have a much larger impact. Based on my reading of one of his other books, and even an e-mail exchange I had with Professor Loewen, I believe that he hoped people would use his methodologies and practice local history projects of their own.