The only paper that can adequately cover the news in Clown World:
CNN wants you to believe that Uganda is threatening to execute two men simply for being gay. It is important to The Narrative that anybody who criticizes anything an alphabet person does is cruelly deranged.
That's why CNN advertised its story using a headline that leaves the impression that it does:
Strom notes the few true details in this stew of lies: Uganda does criminalize homosexuality and the current government is intolerant of it.
But the men aren't being punished for being gay -- they're being punished for being gay rapists.
That's an important point, no? Or is CNN now finally pulling off the mask and just saying, "yes, gays can commit whatever violations they like -- like performing sexualized dances in front of children -- and it's okay because they're Special Creatures Who Play By Their Own Rules."
They do believe that, but I don't think they're ready to admit that yet.
What is so infuriating about this story is how these two abhorrent cases are simply being used as a springboard for going into why this law is so awful. About 70% of the story has nothing to do with these cases--after all, how do you defend rapists?--and instead focuses on how Uganda is a nasty homophobic place.
You know what's also nasty, CNN? R^ping a child.
Michigan's ghoulish Gretchen Whitmer has been, get this, using codewords in her emails to keep them from being discovered in lawsuits and FOIA requests.
These big document-seeking requests rely on just searching for specific words that a judge agrees would mark a communication as relevant to a case, or to a FOIA request.
Using codewords instead of the correct, proper words to refer to things is a "calculated scheme" to commit frauds upon the court and thwart legitimate transparency laws.
A consultant for Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D., Mich.) used a coded message in a "calculated" effort to "conceal" from the public record sensitive communications regarding the administration's response to a local water crisis in Michigan, according to a lawsuit.
Michigan energy department consultant Andy Leavitt in September 2021 emailed a top adviser to Whitmer to express "some major red flags" with the administration's response to a lead water crisis in southwestern Michigan, which Leavitt compared to a similar crisis in Flint, Michigan. But Leavitt's initial message was not written in English--the consultant used letters in the Greek alphabet in place of English ones, a move that "appears to be calculated to conceal the statements," a June court filing in a class action suit against Whitmer's government argues. Leavitt's use of Greek letters means his email would have been excluded from any public records request for government communications that contain the word "Flint."
The apparent scheme to hide sensitive conversations from public records requests comes years after Whitmer promised to bring transparency to the Great Lakes State as governor. In Michigan, the governor's office is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, a policy that Whitmer promised to reverse during her 2018 campaign. "Michiganders should know when and what their governor is working on," the Democrat said at the time.
But Whitmer has not reversed the policy. Her office is still exempt from public records requests years after she promised to issue an executive order that would subject her office to such requests. The Democrat during her first term also defended severance payments and confidentiality agreements with former employees, which Republicans characterized as "hush money."
Neither Whitmer nor Leavitt returned requests for comment.
...
One month before the residents filed their suit, Leavitt--a partner at a Michigan strategic consulting firm who was advising Whitmer's energy department--emailed Whitmer senior adviser Kara Cook to express his concern over the administration's "not acceptable" warnings to Benton Harbor residents. Leavitt's top-line assessment of the warnings, however, was written using the Greek alphabet. Changing Leavitt's font to standard English reveals the following message: "Hot off the presses. As I warned there are some major red flags. It seems like we are back at square one having not learned from Flint."
While the lawsuit eventually led to the discovery of Leavitt's message, the email likely would have remained hidden from the public if Whitmer's administration had not faced legal action. That's because Michigan's public records department is unable to electronically search for records that use Greek letters, government correspondence obtained by the Washington Free Beacon shows. As a result, even if a concerned citizen or political group caught wind of the tactic and requested energy department communications that use certain Greek letters, Michigan's government would have been unable to provide them without searching for the letters manually, an extremely expensive process that can take years.
A veteran public records researcher told the Free Beacon he had never seen government officials use foreign alphabets to convey sensitive messages.
Per a Rasmussen Poll, Americans agree by a 2-to-1 margin that securing the US border is more important than helping Ukraine fight its war against Russia.
A coalition of 1,609 scientists from around the world have signed a declaration stating "there is no climate emergency" and that they "strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy" being pushed across the globe. The declaration does not deny the harmful effect of greenhouse gasses, but instead challenges the hysteria brought about by the narrative of imminent doom.
The declaration, put together by the Global Climate Intelligence Group (CLINTEL), was made public this month and urges that "Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific."
CLINTEL is an independent foundation that operates in the fields of climate change and climate policy. CLINTEL was founded in 2019 by emeritus professor of geophysics Guus Berkhout and science journalist Marcel Crok.
"Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures," the declaration says.
Of the 1,609 scientists who have signed the declaration, two signatories are Nobel Prize laureates. The most recent to sign is Nobel Prize winner Dr. John F. Clauser, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics. In an announcement from CLINTEL, Clauser is quoted as saying "Misguided climate science has metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience. In turn, the pseudoscience has become a scapegoat for a wide variety of other unrelated ills. It has been promoted and extended by similarly misguided business marketing agents, politicians, journalists, government agencies, and environmentalists."