Bydio

Socialism By Force, For Your Own Good · Snapped Shot.

Mmmm, tasty. Remember, state mandates to pay a private company for a service you may or may not use are all for your own good, dear, so don’t complain. What’s that, you don’t want insurance? FEEL OUR SQUIRRELY WRATH, PUNY HUMAN!

Oklahomans without health insurance could lose their driver’s licenses, state income tax deductions or even college football season tickets under a surprising approach proposed by state Insurance Commissioner Kim Holland.

Such penalties might help Oklahoma improve its dismal ranking in the number of residents who have no health insurance, Holland said this week during her agency’s Summit on the High Cost of Health Insurance.

“None of those are very pleasant, but there needs to be a consequence,” Holland said Thursday.

Squirrely Wrath!

iLL WiLL PreSS

Jonathan Ian Mathers – Squirrely Songs

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Big Bailouts, Bigger Bucks | The Big Picture.

Painful bailout perspective:

The $4.6165 trillion dollars committed so far is about a trillion dollars ($979 billion dollars) greater than the entire cost of World War II borne by the United States: $3.6 trillion, adjusted for inflation (original cost was $288 billion).

Go figure: WWII was a relative bargain.

Dammit.

I ordered some memory stuff from eCost.com a few days ago, used paypal, no problems. Yesterday I bought a couple of Jawbone bluetooth headsets as gifts, and I used a different shipping address (obviously). Unfortunately, Paypal and eCost have their wires crossed, because my billing address was the same as the shipping address, which is incorrect. I tried to fix this, but couldn’t, then figured, “what the hell, it’s Paypal, they don’t need my correct home address anyway.”

So, I was wrong.

I got an email:

Dear Valued Customer:

Thank you for your recent on-line order. We appreciate your business!

We are experiencing an issue processing your recent order and need your assistance.  Please contact us by calling [redacted]. We look forward to hearing from you.

Please note that if we do not hear from you within 48 hours of this message, we will assume that you are no longer interested in this order and will suspend further processing of your order.

Thank you in advance for your assistance.

It sounds a bit scammy, so I checked the web for the number given in the email, and it leads to eCost, so I give them a ringy-ding. I have my first encounter with an extremely chipper Indian girl. Indian customer service is rarely chipper, so extremely chipper is unexpected. We don’t understand each other very well, so the call went on longer than it should, and I had to make sure we were talking about the same order (remember, the memory order earlier… heh, I made a funny), but I think I understand that she wants me to log into my account and change the incorrect billing address. Fine, I can do that.

I log in (after searching the web for a way to log into my account on eCost, because there are no direct links), see that I can’t change my billing address, and figure I’ll shoot off an email with my billing address as well as explaining the situation, and all will be well.

Yeah, you’re right. I wouldn’t be writing this if all went well.

I get an almost exact replica of the original email as a reply, saying there’s a problem with my order and I should call their number. Shit.

Dear Ecost.com Valued Customer,

Thank you for your recent inquiry. After reviewing your order I see that there is some more information that we must verify with you. We do apologize for any inconvenience that this may have caused you.

If you would, please contact our customer contact center at [redacted] and one of our agents will be more than happy to assist you.

Thank you for visiting eCOST.com,

Customer Service Specialist

Further, they sent another email saying that my order had been canceled per my request. Well no, I didn’t request that, so I reply to that email and say so.

Are you quicker than me in figuring out what kind of response I got to that email? Yup, you guessed it.

Dear Ecost.com Valued Customer,

Thank you for your recent inquiry. After reviewing your order I see that there is some more information that we must verify with you. We do apologize for any inconvenience that this may have caused you.

If you would, please contact our customer contact center at [redacted] and one of our agents will be more than happy to assist you.

Thank you for visiting eCOST.com,

Customer Service Specialist

So I sent emails canceling the order and I’m done. Here’s their response to my request to cancel the order:

Dear Ecost.com Valued Customer,

Thank you for your recent inquiry. Unfortunately, according to our records your order was cancelled. We do apologize for any inconvenience that this may have caused you.

Thank you for visiting eCOST.com,

Customer Service Specialist

Original Message Follows: ————————
Please cancel my order. I will take my business elsewhere.

Thank you.

Not so unfortunate. Yeah… so skip eCost.com if you can. Their customer service sucks.

Roger Wojahn – Oh No You Didn’t

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Yes, it would be good to show the American public the Muslim racist and supremacist attitude in its entirety, at home where they don’t have to censor themselves.

Some of the stories about, and especially caricatures of, Condoleeza Rice should be republished in the American press as part of an inquiry into the savage racism that is taken for granted all over the Arab world. In fact, I have spoken with some students who came back shaken by some of the things they routinely heard about race, and blacks, when they went to study Arabic in programs in Cairo and other places in the Middle East. This — along with the very late (and most unwilling) emancipation of (almost entirely) black slaves in Saudi Arabia, under Western pressure, and the continued enslavement of black Africans wherever the Arabs have managed to get away with it — in the Sudan, and in Mali and Mauritania, and perhaps still in Saudi Arabia today, as well as the horrific treatment meted out to Sudanese refugees in Egypt, should be given attention.

Jihad Watch: Fitzgerald: Arab racism and dissing Obama.

BREAKING: New Gmail Security Flaw. More Domains Get Stolen! | MakeUseOf.com.

What should you do now?

(1) Well, my very first advice would be to check your email settings and make sure your email is not compromised. Check fowarding options and filters. Also make sure to disable IMAP if you don’t use it. This also applies to Google Apps accounts.

(2) Change contact email in your sensitive web accounts (paypal, domain registrar etc.) from your primary Gmail account to something else. If you own the website then change the contact email for your host and registrar accounts to some other email. Preferably to something that you aren’t logged in to when browsing web.

(3) Make sure to upgrade your domain to private registration so that your contact details don’t show up on WhoIS searches. If you’re on GoDaddy I’d recommend going with Protected Registration.

(4) Don’t open links in your email if you don’t know the person they are coming from. And if you decide to open the link make sure to log out first.

The media has been atwitter with Al-Qaida’s Ayman al-Zawahri’s insult of Obama http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D94I1LA80&show_article=1 by calling him the house Negro. What he actually said was abeed al-beit. Abeed is not just a slave, but a black slave. Islam’s refined doctrine of slavery includes over 40 words for slaves, including the slave’s race. If you were white, you would be a mamluk, a white slave.

Al-Qaida’s #2 al-Zawahiri Calls Obama “the House Negro”.

I found it interesting that the Italian slang for “idiot” is mamaluke, and the Arabic term for a white slave is “mamluk”. I don’t know if they’re related, one being a derivative of the other, but it’s quite coincidental.

Cool article, excerpt below. Always nice to be appreciated:

And combat ? If you have seen Rambo you have seen it all – always coming to the rescue when one of our teams gets in trouble, and always in the shortest delay. That is one of their tricks : they switch from T-shirt and sandals to combat ready in three minutes. Arriving in contact with the ennemy, the way they fight is simple and disconcerting : they just charge They disembark and assault in stride, they bomb first and ask questions later – which cuts any pussyfooting short.

» American troops in Afghanistan through the eyes of a French OMLT infantryman.

HT: Solomonia

Marilyn Monroe showed camel toe… huh… huhhuh…

LIFE photo archive hosted by Google

HT: The Phantom Darkroom

Musical Numbers: Bonds | The Big Money.

If this year’s credit crisis taught us anything, it’s that we all need to brush up on our economic vocabulary. But we’re not here to try to explain how terms like credit-default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, and mortgage-backed securities made it into the news for the thousandth time. Instead, we’re starting with the basics; and we’re doing it with the help of a little music. The Big Money presents a Schoolhouse Rock-style video on bonds and what, exactly, they do.

Now it’s on Discovery Channel, between 10am and 11am on weekdays. Getting old episodes I never saw before, too. Freakin’ sweet!

SWEDE! SWEDE! SWEDE!

The Wiseguys – Start The Commotion

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