Tag Archives: responsibilities

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?

What Is Gender?

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The Left and their Progressive-Democratic Party won’t say, as demonstrated in Wednesday’s House Judiciary Committee on abortion rights.

Congressman Dan Bishop (R, NC) asked Dr Yashica Robinson, OBGYN and Alabama Women’s Center for Reproductive Alternatives Medical Director, to define “woman.” She chose not to, saying instead

I think it’s important that we educate people like you about why we’re doing the things that we do. And so the reason that I use she and her pronouns is because I understand that there are people who become pregnant that may not identify that way. And I think it is discriminatory to speak to people or to call them in such a way as they desire not to be called.
…
That’s as comprehensive a definition as I will give you today[.]

Then Bishop asked Aimee Arrambide, Avow Texas Executive Director to define what a woman is. She responded

I believe that everyone can identify for themselves.

When he asked whether men could get pregnant and get abortions, Arrambide was unequivocal.

Yes.

It’s not just these two radicals who are typical of what the Center Left has become, either. President Joe Biden (D), in his budget proposal for this year,

replaced the word “mothers” [with] “birthing people[.]”

Congresswoman Cori Bush (D, MO) also says mothers are birthing people. Apple Inc even has pushed a brand new pregnant man emoji on us.

So, what is a woman? What is gender? They’re whatever, man. That is, whatever, woman. Or something. Or just, whatever.

Still Waiting

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President Joe Biden (D), ‘way last summer, in the middle of his panicky running out of Afghanistan, promised those Afghanis who had worked with the US and with US forces there over the preceding 20 years that they would find welcome in the US.

He lied.

Afghan citizens who worked with the US are still waiting in third-party countries for their promised American visas eight months after leaving Afghanistan.

And this from Biden’s State Department:

After taking office, we worked to reduce the processing time for SIV [Special Immigrant Visa] eligible Afghans, while keeping in place our robust security and medical screening processes[.]

Eight months. Vetting certainly needs to be done thoroughly, but there’s no reason to dither about it. These folks already have been vetted to a considerable degree over those years that they had worked with/for us.

This is just more of Biden’s betrayal of those who helped us.

Putin Threatens Again

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Now he’s “advising” the Swedish government that if they join NATO—or merely apply to join—it’ll be too bad for their nice little country:

Sweden’s accession to NATO will inflict considerable damage to the security of Northern Europe and Europe as a whole. The Russian Federation will have to take response measures, both military-technical and others, to curb the threats to its national security which arise in this context.

Because moving to defend itself against a threat is itself threatening. Putin is projecting. If he truly has no designs against Sweden (or Finland, come to that, or Europe), then there is nothing to fear from an alliance that is defensive in nature.

And this implied threat:

[M]uch will depend on the specific conditions of Sweden’s integration into the North Atlantic Alliance, including the potential deployment of strike systems of this military bloc on its territory[.]

Attempting to dictate the domestic military policy of a sovereign nation: “no foreign troops or systems on your soil are allowed by me.”

Putin continues to demonstrate clearly why a defensive buildup by free and sovereign nations is necessary.

Silence is Violence

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That’s what the Left likes to say when folks of whom they disapprove don’t talk/tweet/Facebook post/whatever about events on which the Left casts opprobrium.

There has occurred the firebombing of an Oregon Right to Life facility in the Salem, OR, suburb of Keizer.

It’s been more than a week since that cynically timed for Mother’s Day attack, and Oregon’s Progressive-Democratic Party elected politicians are being determinedly quiet about it.

Governor Kate Brown, Senator Jeff Merkley, and Senator Ron Wyden all declined to respond to multiple requests for comment via phone and email from Fox News Digital regarding the firebomb attack….

And

The Twitter accounts of Brown, Wyden, and Merkley also did not mention or condemn the attacks and all three have tweeted about other issues since Sunday, including Wyden, who warned Americans that their geolocation data could be “weaponized” against them if they seek an abortion.

Silence by the Progressive-Democrats. Except when they’re being overtly pro-abortion.

…pro-choice protesters across the country have stormed Catholic churches and some have called for vandalism in the Roe v Wade debate.

Caroline Reilly, of the Rewire News Group, has been particularly explicit (Jerry Dunleavy, of the Washington Examiner, had to retweet Reilly’s call because Reilly subsequently tried to rewrite her history and pretend she’d not called for murder by deleting her tweet):

Rot in the ground. Tweeted out Mother’s Day evening, shortly after the firebombing.

But the Progressive-Democrats are silent on the matter of violence against those who disagree with them.