Thanks Grandma!

“A computer repair man said having this is like gold.  If everybody you know does this then you need not ever worry about opening mail from friends.”

Thank you.  Now everyone will have a silly address entry called “AAAAAAA@AAA.AAA”  in their contact list.  I have no idea what this does, but I’m sure half the family and friends on the fwd list are are actively fighting viruses with this ridiculous technique.  Sweet……another false sense of security!

How to protect your e-mail address book

A computer repairman says this is like having gold.  This is a good thing.  I learned a computer trick today that’s really ingenious in its simplicity.

As you may know, when/if a worm virus gets into your computer it heads straight for your email address book, and sends itself to everyone in there, thus infecting all your friends and associates.

This trick won’t keep the virus from getting into your computer, but it will stop it from using your address book to spread further, and it will alert you to the fact that the worm has gotten into your system.

Here’s what you do:

First, open your address book and click on ‘new contact, just as you would do if you were adding a new friend to your list of email addresses.  In the window where you would type your friend’s first name, type in ‘ A’.

For the screen name or email address, type AAAAAAA@AAA.AAA

Now, here’s what you’ve done and why it works:
The ‘name ‘A’ will be placed at the top of your address book as entry #1.

This will be where the worm will start in an effort to send itself to all your friends.
When it tries to send itself to  AAAAAAA@AAA.AAA, it will be undeliverable because of the phony email address you entered.  If the first attempt fails (which it will because of the phony address), the worm goes no further and none of your friends will be infected.

Here’s the second great advantage of this method:  If an email cannot be delivered, you will be notified of
this in your In Box almost immediately.  Hence, if you ever get an email telling you that an email addressed to AAAAAAA@AAA.AAA could not be delivered, you know right away that you have the worm virus in your
system.  You can then take steps to get rid of it!

Pretty slick huh?

If everybody you know does this then you need not ever worry about opening mail from friends.
DO IT NOW and pass this on to all your friends.

Illegal Immigrants Get SSI and Medicare!

This is an insult and a kick in the butt to all of us…

Get mad and pass it on – I don’t know how, but maybe some good
will come of this travesty.
If the immigrant is over 65, they can apply for SSI and Medicare and get more than a woman on Social Security, who worked from 1944 until 2004. She is only getting $791 per month because she was born in 1924 and there’s a ‘catch 22′.
It is interesting that the federal government provides a single refugee with a monthly allowance of $1,890. Each can also obtain an additional $580 in social assistance, for a total of $2,470 a month.
This compares to a single pensioner, who after contributing to the growth and development of America for 40 to 50 years, can only receive a monthly maximum of $1,012 in old age pension and Guaranteed Income Supplement.

Maybe our pensioners should apply as refugees!

Consider sending this to all your American friends, so we can all be ticked off and maybe get the refugees cut back to $1,012 and the pensioners up to $2,470. Then we can enjoy some of the money we were forced to submit to the Government over the last 40 or 50 or 60 years.
Please forward to every American to expose what our elected politicians have been doing over the past 11 years – to the over-taxed American.

SEND THIS TO EVERY AMERICAN TAXPAYER YOU KNOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well, I don’t know if any of you have gotten this one but I found a post on Factcheck.org concerning this. It’s false.  Feel free to fact check the fact check, but this appears to be complete Doodie!

We’ll start with the most comical error. There is no monthly payment to refugees.

Also wrong – and by a wide margin – is the claim that a Social Security pensioner can get “a monthly maximum of $1,012 in old age pension.” The true figure is more than double that. A person retiring this year at the full retirement age of 66 could qualify for a monthly check of up to $2,323, depending on how much she earned and paid into the system over her working life, according to the Social Security Administration.

The example of the woman who retired in 2004 after 60 years of work is also absurd. For one thing, somebody born in 1924 normally would have retired no later than full retirement age – which then was 65 years and four months – rather than continuing to work until age 80.

It’s remotely possible that a relatively low-income worker would have received a monthly pension check of only $791 per month as claimed, but depending on her earnings over her working life she could have received up to $1,825 per month – which was the maximum pension benefit for persons retiring in 2004 at full retirement age. The average monthly benefit paid to all retirees in January 2004, including those who retired in earlier years, was $903. That was adjusted upward to $922 by the annual cost of living adjustment that year.

The reference to a “catch 22″ may be a garbled allusion to the “notch baby” controversy from an earlier decade. Some persons born between 1916 and 1921 felt unfairly treated by an adjustment Congress made in 1977, and they lobbied Congress for years to increase their benefits. Financial columnist Jane Bryant Quinn called their grievance “a distortion” in a 1999 article explaining the background. But whatever side one takes in the dispute, it’s a simple fact that  somebody born in 1924 would not have been affected.

The message seeks to generate outrage about over-generous treatment of “immigrants,” but misleads the reader in several ways – mainly by failing to distinguish between illegal immigrants (who generally don’t qualify for any benefits) and naturalized U.S. citizens.

It begins by saying “If the immigrant is over 65, they can apply for SSI and Medicaid.” Note that SSI, the acronym for Supplemental Security Income, is a welfare system separate from Social Security retirement benefits. Medicaid is a state-federal program providing medical insurance for low-income persons and is separate from the federal Medicare system for any American who reaches age 65.

Generally, legal immigrants – those who have become citizens and some who have legal permission to be in the U.S – can qualify for these programs on the same basis as anybody else. (The rules allowing some non-citizens to get SSI are complicated, and explained here.) Many people see the word “immigrants” and automatically think “illegal,” and the plain fact is that illegal immigrants don’t qualify for either SSI or Social Security.

Illegal immigrants also don’t qualify for Medicaid, except in certain emergency conditions, and that amounts to relatively little. A 2007 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association looked at 48,391 individuals who received services reimbursed under Emergency Medicaid during a 4-year period in North Carolina, a state with a rapidly growing immigrant population. The study found that nearly all the patients were in the U.S. illegally, but that spending for their emergency care (mostly childbirth and treating complications of pregancy) amounted to less than 1 percent of the state’s total Medicaid spending.

To sum up: This email’s claim that immigrants and refugees get more generous Social Security, SSI and Medicaid benefits than ordinary citizens is completely wrong.

-Brooks Jackson