What gives with 247-host.com?

I recently signed up for some web services with Canadian hosting company 247-host.  As usual, I gave them my credit card details and expected that to be the end of it.  Instead I got an email as below.  The email sounded like a classic scam to me so I declined to give the info requested and asked for a refund of what I had paid.  I expected that to be the end of it with my money lost

But here's the funny thing.  They DID refund my money!  They had my money all along but still wanted extra documentation.  Very strange indeed!  If they were crooks, why did they refund my money?  And if they were honest, why did they demand all my personal details?  It makes no sense.

I have been buying stuff off the net for years and I have NEVER had an enquiry such as the one below.  Once a supplier has my  money, that has always been sufficient.  Very strange people indeed!  The best theory I can come up with to explain it is that they are very clever crooks.  Or maybe they just don't want customers.  At a minimum their PR skills are at rock bottom


247-host URGENT Credit Card Validation Needed

Dear Customer,

Due to the recent fraud activity we have been receiving for credit card payments we will require a copy of your government issued ID (for example drivers license, passport etc.) and credit card ending in 9916

Please fax these 2 documents to us at 1-514-439-3249 or you can email it to us.

We need these documents within the next 24 hours for our records.
Inability to provide valid documentation within 24 hours will result in cancellation of the order.

If you are unable to provide this information you can pay using paypal or western union. Please email us back if you have any questions or concerns.

We appreciate your cooperation in this matter.

247-Host

Web: http://www.247-host.com/  http://www.247-host.ca/
Phone: 1-877-791-3474
ENGAGE US: http://twitter.com/247webhost

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France takes centre stage in the clash of civilisations

by Henry Ergas

When the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille was celebrated on July 14, 1790 in an elaborate “Feast of the Federation”, the 20-year-old Wordsworth rhapsodised that “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven,” while an ageing Kant mused that humanity might finally have “matured”. Two centuries later, at least 10 children and 74 adults lie dead, mowed down as they celebrated Bastille Day on Nice’s iconic Promenade des Anglais.

The timing of the attack, which has been claimed by Islamic State, may have been simply opportunistic and there is considerable uncertainty about the perpetrator. But the conflict between the ideals of the French revolution and Islamic fundamentalism’s world-view is as obvious as the differences are irreconcilable. The revolution extolled reason; the fundamentalists worship at the alter of apocalyptic irrationality. And the revolution proclaimed (although it often failed to respect) freedom, including freedom of religion; the fundamentalists seek a caliphate in which only the laws of Islam prevail.

But the revolution also established an enduring concept of citizenship that underpinned the French nation, “one and indivisible”. Far more than any other European country, it was open to foreigners; it demanded, however, that they join the nation on its terms. As Michael Walzer put it, “foreigners were welcomed — so long as they learned the French language, committed themselves to the republic, sent their children to state schools, and celebrated Bastille Day”.

It was equally insistent on what they were not to do: isolate themselves in ethnic enclaves that clashed with the broader community of citizens. Already in 1791, the refusal of a right to differentiate and divide was expressed in the Legislative Assembly’s debate on the emancipation of the Jews by Clermont-Tonnerre, a deputy of the centre, when he spoke for the majority (which favoured emancipation): “One must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation,” Clermont-Tonnerre declared, “and grant everything to the Jews as individuals.”

That principle — that citizenship was not a mere scrap of paper but a personal act of adherence to the country’s norms and trad­itions — proved remarkably successful, integrating generations of immigrants who were happy to call themselves French citizens. However, as France has grappled with its 4.7 million Muslims, it has completely broken down. Michele Tribalat, who as director of research at France’s National Institute of Demography pioneered the analysis of ethnic data, highlights the trends in her recent book Assimilation: the End of the French Model.

Nowhere are the differences Tribalat examines starker than in respect of religion. Among the non-Muslim population, secularisation is the order of the day, with the proportion declaring themselves to be of no religion climbing from 40 per cent for the cohort born in the years between 1958 and 1970 to 60 per cent for that of 1981-1990. In contrast, for French residents of North African origin, that share has collapsed, with the proportion that are not religious declining from 45 per cent for the older cohort to 20 per cent for the younger.

The disparity is even greater in the numbers who regard religion as very important in everyday life. In the 1958-1970 cohort, there were twice as many Catholics as Muslims for whom religion mattered a great deal; now, in the country which long prided itself on being the “eldest daughter” of the church, there are more devout young Muslims than devout young Catholics and Protestants combined.

Accompanying those trends are others. As young Muslims have become more religious, they have become stricter in observing dietary and dress requirements and in placing emphasis on religious instruction. Meanwhile, intermarriage rates between Muslims and non-Muslims remain extremely low, both absolutely and relative to intermarriage rates overall.

There is, in other words, a growing divide between France’s Muslim and non-Muslim populations. For sure, the country’s notoriously high minimum wage and its rigid labour laws — which together condemn the poorly educated to unemployment — have aggravated that separation. But it would be wrong to view the underlying tendencies as primarily economic: rather, Tribalat shows, they have occurred in every income group and social class, including the relatively well-off.

In and of itself, a renewal of religion would hardly be cause for concern: the world could use more faith. What it does not need, however, is the fanaticism that has accompanied the Islamic revival, in France and elsewhere, and that so readily degenerates into a cult of death. With Islamist terrorists committing 250 murders in France in barely 18 months, the question is where the country goes next.

On that there is no consensus; but it is increasingly clear that familiar remedies, such as the costly “de-radicalisation” programs under way in the region around Nice, have few benefits. As for empowering the imams themselves, as France has sought to do since the early 1990s, that has just entrenched religion as a social dividing line, as Malek Bouthih, a socialist parliamentarian of Algerian origin who authored the official report on last year’s massacres, has repeatedly emphasised.

In their place, there is a growing recognition of realities: even Francois Hollande is unlikely to say, as he did immediately after the attack at Charlie Hebdo, that the terrorists “have nothing to do with Islam”. And as the state of emergency is renewed for another three months, the already extensive security measures are set to become even more far-reaching.

France is therefore paying a high price for the “clash of civilisations” it was so slow to acknowledge. Islam, as Samuel Huntington wrote, “has bloody borders”; now, with the chaos in the Islamic world only deepening, those borders lie within France. As yet more victims are laid to rest, the lodestars of 1789 — liberty, equality and fraternity — seem more urgent, and more elusive, than ever.

SOURCE

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VA Supreme Court Strikes Down McAuliffe's Executive Order Giving Felons Right to Vote

Despite Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s sweeping executive order that sought to restore voting rights to felons in Virginia, they will not be able to cast their ballot at voting booths come November thanks to the commonwealth’s Supreme Court, which declared the order unconstitutional on Friday.

The high court heard oral arguments earlier this week. The plaintiffs in the case, led by leaders from the Republican-controlled legislature, argued that McAuliffe’s move was unconstitutional. The court agreed, and ordered the Virginia Department of Elections to “cancel the registration of all felons who have been invalidly registered,” under the April 22 executive order.

As many as 11,662 felons had registered to vote thanks to the executive order. The order was widely viewed as a move to help Hillary Clinton by all-but-ensuring Virginia goes blue in the November general election, since most convicts register Democratic.

SOURCE

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Trump Scheduled to Receive Intelligence Breifings

After winning the Republican presidential nomination on Tuesday, Donald Trump is now set to receive U.S. intelligence briefings, according to ABC News.

This will mark the first time that someone who has never served in government will receive the intelligence briefings.

After each party's convention and each candidate is chosen, both nominees will receive the same briefings about threats from around the world.  The Democratic National Convention concludes on Thursday, where Hillary Clinton is expected to accept the nomination.

Current and former officials have expressed concern over briefing Clinton, due to her handling of classified information when she was secretary of State the use of a  personal email as a means of communication.

SOURCE

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Murderous government doctors in Britain

They just can't be bothered with the elderly.  The architects of Obamacare had a similar attitude

Doctors at one of the country's leading hospitals condemned a veteran to die on a notorious 'death pathway' after they wrongly decided he could not be saved.

Great-grandfather Josef Boberek was admitted to Hammersmith Hospital in West London with a chest infection, but died days later after doctors incorrectly told his family that he was at death's door and deliberately withdrew his fluids and normal medication.

Now an official health watchdog report seen by The Mail on Sunday has revealed that the pensioner would have lived and returned to his normal life had he received proper treatment and not been placed on the discredited Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP).

Mr Boberek's daughter Jayne, who fought a three-year battle to uncover the truth, said last night: 'My father was condemned to an unnecessary early death by the doctors. They had no right to take his life, and him away from me.'

The damning report by the Health Service Ombudsman found a litany of failings at the hospital, including:

    Doctors claimed Mr Boberek was suffering from terminal heart and kidney failure when he was not;

    Although he was frail, he would almost certainly have lived if he had been properly treated;

    He was not suffering from dementia, as stated in his medical notes.

In what is believed to be the first time hospital chiefs have publicly accepted that the LCP had 'killed' a patient, the Imperial College Healthcare Trust told Miss Boberek that 'if the failings had not happened, on the balance of probabilities your father would have survived and returned to his nursing home'.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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