Archive for the ‘Helping Others’ Category

I have been very lax about posting and posting something interesting lately. I’ve have had some very nasty days with my fibromyalgia. I have been reading up on the so-called Obama care. While I do see parts of a Obama Care that should be repaired. Overall it is better in the long run than anything I’ve heard out of the Republican camp. I do disagree with charging minimums that require you to purchase health care insurance. I would set a final price $100,000, and anyone making more than that would need to get their own insurance policy they could self pay or employer pay. However, if you make less a $100,000, (150,000 or more for married filing jointly) you would be eligible for Medicaid. Medicaid requirements should be paid by the  federal government. Romney has already stated that he would drop Medicaid altogether. Back in the 60′sRepublicans fought tooth and nail attempting to block Medicaid and Medicare. If not for Pres. Johnson, we would not have Medicaid or Medicare. Well that and equal rights. Republicans, including our longtime senator Strom Thurmond were against equal rights. If I remember correctly, Thurmond, holds the record for longest filibuster of all time in the USA and that he was for speaking out against the Civil Rights Bill. That is the truth behind the Republicans legacy.

If we can retain”Obama Care”starting January 1, 2014, medicaid expansion will now have a new limit. Anyone making 113% of poverty the level will be eligible for Medicaid. This is a step in the right direction. That part is good. The bad part is that it will impose a filing minimum of $95 or a 1% of the filing income minimum, depending upon which one of the two is the highest This is where I think there are problems. By 2016, they are starting to create tax credits or charges or not having insurance. More on that later.

I have discovered how to receive free health care for all of us. There is one hitch though. We need to move to a third world country that has a deep water port. Our Navy, (the best in the world) will provide health care for the needy in these foreign ports. I know it is a good thing to help these people who might otherwise suffer or worse, die in their humanitarian and friend building efforts. However I feel if they can do this for non citizens of our country why can’t they do the same for us? As I have stated before I am a vet so I am eligible for some of the best health care anywhere in the world. I can not say that for the rest of my family though. Our easiest way to provide basic health care for all of our citizens is to expand the medicare and medicaid roles. I know this does not fix everything and that they will have to limit some procedures but it would be a huge step in the right direction. I also know that there would be a huge outcry against the government controlling what could and could not be done for us. However those same healthcare insurance companies who would fight a move like that tooth and nail would still be able to offer health care to anyone who wanted more coverage for themselves and their family. I know that this is not the complete fix for our healthcare but we need more than is going to be supplied by “ObamaCare” as they call it but we need more not less as the Republicans are poised to do if they win the elections this year. It was them who fought so hard against Medicare and Medicaid during President Johnson reign. Now it is so basic and important we wonder how we made it before it was instated.

just the thoughts of the ringleader

Today I site here feeling very privileged. I just got through a private screening of a movie that is to be released later this year. It was a documentary about our failing health care in the United States. The working title is “The Health Care Movie” and is narrated by Kiefer Sutherland. It compares our health care system to Canada’s health care system. Seeing it made the plan we have here in the good ol’ USA pale in comparison to theirs. They believe in taking care of their citizens and not favoring huge corporations over the masses. They also see it as a basic human right. Something we agreed to, and ratified when we signed the “The Declaration of Human Rights”. If you look it up and start reading go down to article 25.  There you will find us agreeing that health care is a human right. But I am off topic here somewhat.

I was talking about the movie I was allowed to see. It gives some shocking facts and numbers about our nonexistent health care. I hope that everyone will see this and be mad as hell. Writing their congressman  or senator mad. Everyone needs health care at some point in their lives. That is a fact no one  can dispute. The question is can you afford it? Is your insurance going to cover it. How much money comes out of my pocket? None of us can deny it. Even if you have health care you will have a co-pay and how large does that go? What if my bill becomes so large that my out of pocket money is too high for me? Will I have to sell the house to pay? Will I have to file bankruptcy because of an illness or accident? In our system all of these scenarios are not only possible but happen. A lot of times this is the story. Even a wealthy family can be bankrupted by a prolonged illness. I feel like this is a travesty that we allow for profit, private insurance companies run our health care system. They arbitrarily dictate what treatments we can or can’t have and we let them have their way in the name of democracy. If you were to remember your history you will find that Lyndon Johnson pushed medicare and medicaid through the halls of Congress. That was in direct apposition with insurance companies and their lackeys in Congress. Back then it was painted as an end to democracy and the beginning of socialism. Now it is considered essential. It is a sure fired method of losing votes if you voice a plan on cutting medicare and medicaid. It took some wrangling and over the objections of insurance companies they were passed into law. That is what we need now. someone to push expanding medicare and medicaid to cover everyone in the USA. But that is my simple plan. No need for all these tax credits and vouchers.

Anyhow that is my opinion. I have good health care from the VA but not everyone has served their country.

I was able to view the movie early because they used my sons song part of the movie. The title is “Silence
Is Consent“ It was really great to see my sons name in the credits. It brought tears to my eyes for him to be so honored. The song fits this movie perfectly as my son feels very strongly that everyone should have access to health care regardless of whether they have money or not. I made the song title a link to his “website“ joshua121.   You can hear the song there on the site. I recommend that you listen to it then write your congressman or woman. Don’t forget that you have a senator that needs to know that we need health care. That is the only thing that matters to a politician, votes and how much money he can gather from corporations and others for his next reelection campaign.

There is a country in severe trouble. There are many who have no homes, shelter and clean drinking water. Many citizens have no heat in the winter nor a way to cool off during it’s normal summer heat waves. The elderly and young children are the ones who need air condition to prevent them dying during its heat waves. Thousands are without jobs and lack basic health care for the sick. What country is this that sounds as if it is in such dire straights? The country that needs this help is not overseas where we send so much money but instead right here at home. The US is in need of help but instead they say to hell with those unfortunates and send money overseas instead. I am not saying that there are countries that do not have dire needs but we should take care of our own people first.

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 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 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.

A new method of phishing attack is starting to rear its head up to try and gain sensitive information from unsuspecting users. This new method goes back to the warning I have given out for years now. Do not have a sensitive page (ie, your bank, paypal..etc) open while browsing. What this new threat does is it will attack a vulnerable website and injects a javascript code into the site. When you visit the now infected site and have a window open to your bank it causes a popup to come up that tells you that your session has timed out and you need to relog in. Make sure you log out of sensitive sites before browsing. If you have a website make sure you are secure and check for any changes in coding. That is what happened to this site and some others I am hosting. It wasn’t a threat to capture your information but we did get attacked by the yahoo counter script. The first things we noticed was the fact that our rss feeds were broken. Then doing a source search we found yahoo counter starts at the bottom of the page before the closing body tags. I do not know what the exact code is that this one places into websites but will attempt to find it. I feel as a responsible website owner I should try to stay on top of the situation and even moved my sites to a more secure server.

Here is what Trusteer.com explains about the sophisticated attacks:

“An in-session phishing attack occurs while the victim is logged onto an online banking application and therefore is much more likely to succeed. A typical attack scenario would occur as follows. A user logs onto their online banking application to perform some tasks. Leaving this browser window open, the user then navigates to other websites. A short time later a popup appears, allegedly from the banking website, which asks the user to retype their username and password because the session has expired, or complete a customer satisfaction survey, or participate in a promotion, etc. Since the user had recently logged onto the banking website, he/she will likely not suspect this popup is fraudulent and thus provide the requested details.”

To protect themselves from in-session phishing attacks, Trusteer recommends that users:
1. Deploy web browser security tools
2. Always log out of banking and other sensitive online applications and accounts before navigating
to other websites
3. Be extremely suspicious of pop ups that appear in a web session if you have not clicked a hyperlink

I’ve been busy yet again moving things on servers. I was not happy with the one I first intended to move everything onto when I found out that you can not have folders or files with write permissions (666,or 777). That and the fact that I still have not gotten all the releases for my other domains to move and remove the yahoo counter script from them as I migrate servers. I did find 9 instances where we had missed getting it all off the server and therefore out of the files. A couple of readme.html files and7 places where the entire code was not removed. Thank goodness for TextCrawler it has been a life saver. This script, that begins; “Yahoo! Counter starts” is either placed into js,htm, html or shtml pages that I have found so far. It is more complex code that is placed into php pages but it then generates the same code that can be found by viewing the pages source code. I tried in my last post to insert an image of the code, but that fails to give you a good idea of what to look for when removing it from your site. I am reluctant to post it online but will gladly share it with anyone who needs help and asks for it. The code is rather lengthy also so to place it into a post would lose you my readers. I tend to get lost in that much code myself. One of the easiest ways to remove it is to copy the entire text into TextCrawler. Then use a comment something like this and replace the code. This will work for all your web pages and takes only a few minutes. If you do not have that many infected pages you might wish to open them up individually and remove the code from each of them. But if you have something like a gallery I had been testing that ended up with over 3000 files infected I doubt you want to fix each file. I am not even going to replace them I am going to drop them when I move everything else. You can not even delete folders full of the infected files off your webserver as they are chmodded to 444 and the ownership is changed from your account to HTTPD. Without fixing that the only recourse is to delete them individually then replace them. A lot of work that my soon to be completely former host IX Webhosting will not help with or even acknowledge is their fault. You can get them to change ownership and even chmod the files back to 755 but if you do not get it fixed right away it will change back. Even if you do get everything fixed back but leave it on their server it puts the bad code back into your pages, or at least it did mine that way. If you need any help, or just want to vent over IX’s lack of help shoot me a line or comment. I’ll help what I can.

I have been very busy the past week moving to a new server for my file-house.com hosting company. I ran into a snag with my old provider when they allowed a rather insidious script to be injected across all of my sites. It slips in and changes permissions on files. It masquerade itself as a yahoo counter but attacks all your files and will break your rss feeds. If it attacks your wordpress blog the easiest way to deal with it will be to delete everything and start anew. Make sure you save your wp-config.php files information but not the code. But if you have a custom theme you can’t do that and will need to crawl every  page with a text crawler like TextCrawler to search your files or you would be searching individually for days. Depending upon plugins you will have a couple hundred or so files that will be infected the code looks like this;

<!--Yahoo! Counter

This is not all of the code but if you need it just let me know and I will hook you up with a copy to use for searching your site with. So far all the php files have had one code and the html files have had the code that is generated into the webpages that starts “<!–Yahoo! Counter” without the ” marks. I have cleared this one and Brainfoggles and have a couple more to go so I can migrate to the new servers clean of infections.

I was watching NCIS last night as I usually do and just had a feeling that something wasn’t just right and popped online to see how my friends were doing. It must have been a psychic feeling cause sure enough my friend Connie over at Brain Foggles was having trouble with her new blog Conniesview. It had stopped displaying and was reporting an error instead of showing a page. We had this error ;
Parse error: parse error, unexpected ‘<' in /wp-includes/post-template.php on line 734
She of course was panicking so I jumped right on it. I host her blog and give her hands on support something we plan on being able to do for others who wish to blog but have no knowledge of being a web/blog master. A quick search showed it was being discussed on the message boards of wordpress support. The post-template.php file was only supposed to have 733 lines of code instead of the 734 it was reporting though in dreamweaver it showed about 6 lines or more of apparently undecipherable code. A quick ftp of the now fixed page had her up and running in no time. Everything was lovely once more, or so I thought until I checked this blog and it to was reporting the exact same error. wow quick fix or so I thought. After fixing the file I got another error in the comment mailer plugin, seeing as how I don’t use it anyhow I simply deleted it ,and once more the world is revolving and everything rosy again. If you have problems with yours or need some help maybe this will help you out. I did post the fix on wp support forums too in case you need to look.