Archive for July, 2011

According to a study published by the Journal of Social Science & Medicine. Researchers in Montreal found out that unemployment will shorten your life span. The findings that analyzed data over a forty year span, in fifteen countries and millions of individuals say that 78% of men and 37% of women face the likely hood of premature death. With our unemployment rate at nearly 20% that means millions of Americans are at risk of an early death. Right now our representatives are wrestling with our budget trying to cut out programs that help unemployed as well as under employed citizens. The easiest thing to do would be for Obama himself to invoke the 14th Amendment and raise the debt ceiling where they do not have to cut out programs that are essential for the unemployed and poor people who comprise about half of the US. The Republicans darling, Ronald  Regan not only raised taxes in his term but he raised the debt ceiling eighteen times while he was in office. However Obama and the rest of the democrats are trying to make the Republicans look bad so they can insure that they win big at the polls when Obama comes up for reelection. I know we need to do something about this runaway debt we have accumulated but why does it have to be done by cutting out programs for the less fortunate citizens who need these services the most. Why not cut out the corporate welfare we have been dishing out with nothing in return? These tax breaks and bailouts were supposed to keep these companies in business so they can create more jobs. But that is not what they do. Instead of creating new jobs they gave huge bonuses to the very same ones that got them in such hot water financially. How did that help us out? Those huge billion dollar bailouts could easily have went to fund the very same programs the Republicans want to make deep cutbacks in or it would have went a long ways to an actual health plan that would work for all Americans. Those who do not like what is offered can always buy their own health care policy. Of course no one actually wants that as they have their greedy pockets lined with lobbyist money.

I have been busy making changes to my web sites and my hosting services. I have updated my services and added more features and increased the service. That is my File-House Web Hosting that hosts my own sites, this one included. I first moved this site then had some problems with the data base and have been offline almost two days. I got some great help through my friends at Dragon Tree Studio. They are working on a new template for this site and the theme I am using is just a hint at what is coming. I hated the one I had and went to a rough draft instead as I like it much better. If you need help creating your very own theme based on your blog or pretty much any web site built or designed as well as graphic design. I highly recommend that you contact Dragon Tree Studio. . I know you will not be disappointed.

According to the Boston Globe, Massachusetts wants to establish a database with the information gathered by license plate scanners installed in police cars. The scanners will scan license plates of every car the police vehicle passes and transmit that information (along with the location) to a database that will be made available to various government agencies. The data will be kept indefinitely. Civil libertarians are raising an alarm and rightly so. This makes me wonder if “1984″ was accurate other than the timing with the date. This sounds like another move towards fascism by our government. Our founding fathers could never have known that technology would proceed as far as it has come. I am sure that if they had of known what was coming they would have definitely banned it while they were defining the Ten Amendments that guarantee our civil liberties.   So many of our liberties are being tossed out the window as our new technological feats make gathering and storing data on individual citizens becomes easier and easier. I can see where they would be of great use if they were simply used to scan the thousands of vehicles a police car sees almost everyday. If they were using the plate readers to look for a specific license plate of someone who was wanted by the authorities and they were not saving all the information gathered into a huge data base where they could check your whereabouts and track your movements maybe that would be a good idea. However scanning all those plates seen by the plate reader into a database to be used by whomever managed to get into the data base is wrong. Keeping track of your movements when you have committed no crime should not be allowed. If you live in Massachusetts you need to contact your local Senator and Representative to block this legislation.

Also a note to Massachusetts politicians: Such videos will be used against you at some point. Count on it. If you don’t care about the privacy of the citizens, at least think of your self interest before voting for this.

I have been having trouble with my internet connection lately. Over the
past couple of weeks internet would come and go on my asus
build windows 7 machine that is my personal computer. It culminated with my
losing internet yesterday for three to four hours. Over the previous
weeks all I had to do was a simple reboot to regain internet. Very
annoying but a simple fix. Yesterday was a totally different matter. I
must have rebooted a dozen times or more trying to reconnect. Thinking
that I might have a hardware issue I went up to a storage building and
carried in a box of network cards. Surely one of these would fix my
problem. After no luck there I decided to try a wireless card and still
will not connect to the internet. It would however connect to the
network. So I then knew it had to be a software issue but where would I
begin to look. I With the wireless card still in place and connected to
the network but no internet I once again ran network diagnostics. This
time it came up with a named error. Now we might just be getting
somewhere. I found out I had a 651 error. We might just be getting
somewhere but where I did not know. It was time to leave that machine
and jump onto my laptop. After some diligent searching and reading I
found some information and a list of  possible culprits.
* The raspppoe.sys file has become
corrupted. RASPPPOE.sys is an acronym for Remote Access Service Point-to-Point
Protocol over Ethernet. This is a windows driver that many broadband
service providers use for authentication when connecting to the
internet through a broadband modem.

* Possible problems with the Local Area
Network
(LAN) card driver.

* There may be a conflict with the modem
driver and
your operating system.

I felt confident the latter two were not the problem. So lets see what
we can do with the raspppoe.sys file. What I then found out was you
need to replace this Windows 7 driver with the same driver but from a
windows Vista machine. Armed with this knowledge I then found the
needed raspppoe.sys file. I am placing a link to it below
rasppoe
so you will not need to do your own search. You will need an unzipping program like
win rar to open the file though. To make this fix you will need to be
in administrator mode (something I strongly urge you not to do for
normal surfing, work and play). You will most likely need to be able to
view hidden files and folders. To do this you will again need to be in
an administrator account. Then:

1.

Open Folder Options
by clicking the
Start button Picture of the Start button, clicking Control Panel,
clicking Appearance and Personalization, and then clicking Folder
Options.

2.

Click the View tab.

3.

Under Advanced
settings, click Show
hidden files, folders, and drives, and then click OK.

Once we have this done we can begin our search for the raspppoe.sys
file. The full path there is C:/Windows/System32/drivers. Once I found
the raspppoe.sys file I attempted to rename it and even with me in
admin mode it refused to allow that so I made a copy of it. and placed
it in a new folder that I named old-raspppoe.sys. I then pasted the
vista version of the raspppoe.sys file  into my drivers folder.
It was at this point I saw that my back up was a mute point as one of my
options was to paste the new file in place and rename the old file
raspppoe (2).sys. No problem there. I backed out of the folder, then
closed all my open pages and rebooted my computer. This time I was all
hooked up. Sweet! I shut her down one more time, removed the wireless
card and pci  NIC, placed the cover back on and booted her up.
Everything was back to normal with only the piles of pulled out hair to
be swept up, LOL. I hope this helps if you run into the same problems with your win 7 machine.

The debate over the budget has been a heated one with some controversial talks about making Medicare recipients pay more for their medical care. If approved these changes could make healthcare for the disabled and elderly rise by hundred or even thousands a year. It remains unclear if the Republicans who demand that trillions of dollars be cut from the budget will go through this year. It seems that they have forgotten how Bush had pretty much a blank check to run our deficit out of sight when it was in the black during the last few years of the Clinton years. It remains unclear to me how anyone who survives from paycheck to paycheck like most of the working class could be a staunch Republican. It seems like everything is on the table to be cut except the tax breaks for the wealthy that are in place. I have gotten way off track here and voiced opinions that have nothing to do with health care. Except the fact that taking care of the unfortunate health problems is far from their thoughts. Members of Congress and Senators get great medical care for free. I wonder if we were to demand that either we get the same good coverage they get or they get none at all if that would make a difference?

I am very proud of my son and he is a very good musician and I would say that even if he were not my son. He, like the majority of these people who keep us entertained does not have health insurance. Besides being a talented musician he is also blessed to have other talents as well. He also has taken the simple html we used to start his first website and blossomed into a first rate webmaster for himself and others. He now owns DragonTreeStudio and creates websites for others too. I am getting off subject but what he does for musicians has started the Musicians Project and they are trying to aid others to get health care information and services.

Where I was going when I started this post is that on their facebook page they have posted about a prescription assistance program. You can find them on their web site Partnership for Prescription
Assistance
I am going to copy their mission statement off their home page:

Prescription Assistance Programs

Prescription Help is Here

The Partnership for Prescription Assistance brings together America’s pharmaceutical companies, doctors, other health care providers, patient advocacy organizations and community groups to help qualifying patients without prescription drug coverage get free or low-cost medicines through the public or private program that’s right for them.”

If this post helps even one person gain some independence from exorbitant drug prices then I have succeeded in helping them get their message out. I am proud and lucky to be a veteran so I can get almost any help with my health care from them but that leaves my wife and daughter along with my son uninsured like so many of our citizens. Most qualifying patients will get free or vastly discounted drugs.

Right now we are in the midst of an alarming rate of mortality for sea water turtle in the Gulf Of Mexico. The death rates are up over 300% so far this year. Part of this is probably due to the ecological disaster that was the Deep Water Horizon crude oil spillage that resulted in millions of barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf and it wildlife and pristine beaches. Even taking into effect the extra deaths due to the oil spill we still have something else contributing to their deaths. Signs point to the shrimping industry as the likely culprit. Now I love to eat shrimp as much as the next person but we really need to make a change in the nets that catch the shrimp as they are also catching and drowning our marine turtles. There is supposed to be a simple remedy for this and it is a devise known as a Turtle Excluder Devise or TED. Adding these devises to the shrimp nets would surely help prevent a large portion of the turtle deaths. You can visit Defenders Of Wildlife Sea Turtle Petition
and sign the petition to urge congress to act to enforce the ESA or Endangered Species Act and make it a requirement to place TED’s in their nets. This would be similar to the way they exclude dolphin from tuna nets now. When it was learned how many dolphins were being killed by tuna fisherman people boycotted brands that did not use the safer dolphin strategies. Maybe we need the same warnings on any shrimp we consume. I feel that all creatures are important and should be protected for our children’s future. I urge you to please visit and sign the Defenders Of Wildlife Sea Turtle
Petition

Right now there is a petition drive being sent to Congress requesting that Congress establish a law to make it illegal to not report a missing child. I have seen two versions of the petition. One of them is to make it against the law to report a missing child that has been missing for 24 – 48 hours. The other version is to make it a felony to not report a child missing if it goes over 30 days missing. I personally think they could combine the two petitions together to create an even tougher law. The links are at Petition2Congress. Everyone who cares for the welfare of helpless children should visit there and sign the petitions.

I just watched them read the verdict in the Anthony case in Florida a few minutes ago and am stunned. With all the evidence against her the jury found her not guilty. Maybe she got away with it, maybe not. All she is guilty of was providing false information to a police officer. If her mother did not kill her then who did? I personally feel that it is a miscarriage of justice, but I was not on that jury. So I do not know what the jury saw that I did not. So once again it proves to me at least that as long as you can afford a good attorney you can get away with murder.

I have been away for quite some time and procrastinating about getting started again. I have been busy building up my Ebay store and maintaining my Power Seller with top rated classification. I full intend to start posting at least several times a week if not daily.
There has been a lot going on with my passions with one of my top concerns being health care for all. They fight, grumble and complain that if the United States were to go to full coverage of all citizens then we would then be a socialist country. I do not believe that France, Great Britain and Canada are socialist countries and they have health care for all. I am lucky that I am a veteran and as so eligible for medical care for life by them. My solution for health care for the US would be to simply expand the roles of Medicare and Medicaid. Then you have the politicians clambering loudly that your health care would not be as good as you could get if you had your own health care. They forget that they have free health care as Congress men and Senators. My opinion is that if you do not like the limitations that they may set on your health care then you can still buy your own health care from anyone of the many health care insurance companies that themselves are complaining loudly about the possibility of health care for all.
More to follow later.