Category Archives: culture

What a Contrast

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In the wake of the Uvalde school mass killings of children and two adults, former President Donald Trump (R) offered condolences as well as thanks to the first responders via Truth Social:

So hard to think or report about anything else after watching the Texas school “massacre.”
Thank you to the great wisdom and bravery of our Law Enforcement Professionals, and condolences to all who are suffering so gravely with the loss of those incredible souls so close to you. No words can express the sorrow and grief of this absolutely horrible event. It is a moment in time which will never be forgotten!

Condolences offered, and no political pitch made.

President Joe Biden (D) had a different attitude. After spending a few seconds expressing his sorrow over the tragedy, he got to his so much more important political screed:

As a nation, we have to ask, when in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby? When in God’s name, will we do what we know in our gut what needs to be done?
We have to act. And don’t tell me we can’t have an impact on this carnage.

“Refuse to Enforce”

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That’s the position of a large number of leftist District Attorneys regarding State abortion-related laws that are likely to take effect or get enacted if the Supreme Court, in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, significantly restricts or overrules Roe v Wade. The DAs are going on record as saying they won’t enforce anti-abortion laws that might take effect.

District attorneys in metropolitan areas including Atlanta, New Orleans, Dallas, and San Antonio have said they won’t prosecute abortion providers or others, including those who assist a woman in obtaining the procedure.

Those aren’t the only regions, either. An Arizonan is running for District Attorney on her promise to refuse to enforce any Arizona anti-abortion law. A sitting DeKalb County, GA, District Attorney says she won’t prosecute abortion providers—Georgia law be damned, apparently, when it doesn’t suit her personal whim.

Object to anti-abortion laws if they disagree with them, certainly. DAs also should work to change those laws, if they disagree with them. But blithely disregard or disobey them?

Only the Left views laws as suggestions to be heeded or ignored at convenience.

DAs—officers of our governments—who ignore these laws or any others they find inconvenient are breaking those laws, and they’re violating their oaths of office.

Those are offenses worthy of prompt removal from office.

The Left’s Hysterics

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Their hysteria seems manufactured, at least when it comes to abortion and their claimed “right” to it.

The radical leftist group Ruth Sent Us (radical left at least by national standards; on the political spectrum of the Left, they’re mainstream) has given that game away.

While crying out that Senate Majority Whip and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D, IL) has a conflict of interest between your Catholic faith and your role as Chair…with sole discretion to hold hearings into corrupt Catholic Justices, they demand that he

Announce televised hearings into the traitors and sexual assaulters on the Court [Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh]. Watch your power grow.

Watch your power grow. There’s the sum and total of it.

Typical of the Left

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And a measure of how radical and extreme our nation’s Left has become, is New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s (D) op-ed, wherein she advertised her State’s protection of the “right” to abortion as an inducement for businesses to return.

A couple of letter-writers in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section are more accurate.

The humor in the governor’s invitation peaks with her description of the “freedom” and “respect” that New York offers its business communities. High tax, high cost, high crime—surely New York’s reputation speaks for itself? The joke may be on the governor.

But especially this:

New York’s Governor Hochul is angered at the possibility that her newborn granddaughter will inherit a “fight” to save abortion. Yet if she had taken advantage of Roe, her descendants would have avoided this fight simply because they would have ceased to exist. Ms Hochul is not fighting for her descendants to fall victim to abortion. She is fighting for yours to do so.

Once Again Kowtowing

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Microsoft is censoring from its search engine Bing—in the US—names of People’s Republic of China personnel that the PRC government doesn’t want easily searched on.

Bing’s autofill system, which offers guesses on what users are searching for after a few keystrokes, often fell silent in connection to names the Chinese government deems sensitive, Citizen Lab said in the report Thursday.

And

Citizen Lab found that in tests late last year, Bing wouldn’t surface autofill suggestions for search terms of the names of Chinese political dissidents and party leaders. Names—including those of Chinese President Xi Jinping and the deceased human-rights activist Liu Xiaobo—wouldn’t appear in the autofill system in English or Chinese.
“We consistently found that Bing censors politically sensitive Chinese names,” the report said.

A carefully anonymous Microsoft spokeswoman laid this censorship off to “technical error,” “a misconfiguration.”

If that’s true, what is Microsoft doing about their software testing personnel who failed to test this adequately?

This, though, isn’t Microsoft’s first “error” regarding censorship. They’ve been caught a number of times in such “configuration errors.”

Last year, on the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, US-based searches on Bing for images and videos of “Tank Man”—a man who stood in front of a column of tanks following the massacre—didn’t show any results.

Of course, that was a technical error. But where were Microsoft’s software testers?

On the other hand, does our government really need to be contracting business with a nominally American enterprise that engages in such un-American behavior?