Prosecutors have given up on prosecuting Trump for hush money payments: report
February 05, 2021
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It took the NYPD 28 seconds to assess the situation of a man in a mental health crisis before they shot him
March 26, 2023
Gothamist reported Sunday that the New York Police Department was called when a man was having a mental health crisis. After just 28 seconds on the scene, they shot and killed him.
It's part of a long list of incidents in which police have been called into situations with a mentally ill person, and it ended in death.
Such was the case when the father of a 42-year-old "emotionally disturbed" man called for help. His son was holding a large kitchen knife when police entered the scene at 10 a.m. He became agitated, and instead of de-escalating the situation, they opened fire.
The body camera footage showed that the entire altercation lasted just 28 seconds, the NYPD admitted.
“The caller, who is the father, describes his adult son having a medical episode, describing he feels he’s being followed, persecuted, and goes on to state, ‘If any cops show up here today, I will kill them,’” NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell said.
Despite the incident lasting less than half of a minute, Chell said, “The officers gave numerous instructions to drop the knife, at which time he did not comply."
The Treatment Advocacy Center's statistics reveal that those with "untreated mental illness are 16 times more likely to be killed during a police encounter than other civilians approached or stopped by law enforcement."
The report explained that there are fewer than 1 in 50 people with untreated mental illnesses. However, those individuals make up 1 in 4 of the individuals killed by police.
“By dismantling the mental illness treatment system, we have turned mental health crisis from a medical issue into a police matter,” said John Snook, the group's director and co-author of the study. “This is patently unfair, illogical and is proving harmful both to the individual in desperate need of care and the officer who is forced to respond.”
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Jan. 6 committee member calls on Republicans to denounce Trump's celebration of political violence
March 26, 2023
Donald Trump's latest idea to attack those investigating him is by claiming "prosecutorial misconduct." The reality is that something like that happens when a prosecutor breaks the law, not when they annoy a high-profile politician.
"I think, obviously, he appears to be worried that he will be indicted. I don't know if he'll be indicted, but certainly, he engaged in criminal conduct," said Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), who sat on the House Select Committee investigating Jan. 6 and the attempt to overthrow the 2020 election. "I mean, our committee did criminal referrals. Of course, doing the referral and, you know, being the prosecutors, two different things. They have to make sure that not only do they have probable cause, but I think, given the high profile of the potential defendant, they're going to want to ensure that they have sufficient evidence to convict. So, there's no evidence whatsoever that there's anything improper on the part of the prosecutors. Although, the ex-president certainly tried to weaponize the Department of Justice when he was president."
CNN host Jim Acosta focused on some of the languages that Trump has started using, calling the 2024 election "the final battle." Acosta noted that Trump made the comment ahead of the 30th anniversary of the Branch Davidian's stand-off with the ATF. Zofgren shook her head with dismay.
She brought up the startling similarities in Trump's rhetoric during the Waco speech and the kind of language he used on Jan. 6.
"In fact, in some ways, it's more overt and blatant than the events leading up to Jan. 6th. I mean, he posted a picture of himself holding a baseball bat, next to the prosecutor in Manhattan, calling the prosecutor a number of horrible names like an animal and thug," Lofgren recalled. "He disparaged the idea that his followers should remain peaceful. This is cause for concern. We know that certainly not all of his followers are inclined to take up arms, but there's enough of them who are willing to do battle on his behalf that someone could get killed, and people were killed, obviously, on Jan. 6."
Acosta noted that as images from the attack on the Capitol played on a large screen, the voices of the men in prison for participating in the violence were playing, singing the national anthem.
"He's elevating the violence," Lofgren. "We know from our investigation that he tried various ways to overturn the election, but he was left only with mob violence by the time Jan. 6th rolled around. To elevate people who have been either convicted or, in most cases, pled guilty to violent assault, these were individuals who viciously attacked police officers in the assault on the Capitol. That's not patriotism. And that he would elevate them as admirable, I think tells me a lot about where the ex-president is in terms of honoring and encouraging violence. I think it's something that's cause for concern. I am worried, frankly, that my Republican colleagues, I think many of them don't agree, but they are not speaking up, and they need to do that, or else once again, we'll see, potentially, violence brought into the political arena. And that's not American. That's absolutely the opposite of being pro-American."
See her full comments below or at the link here.
Zoe Lofgren calls on Republicans to push back against Trump violence youtu.be
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Fury erupted in the art community last year with the release of generative artificial intelligence (AI) programs that can convincingly carry out commands such as drawing a dog like cartoonist Sarah Andersen would, or a nymph the way illustrator Karla Ortiz might do.
Such style-swiping AI works are cranked out without the original artist's consent, credit or compensation -- the three C's at the heart of a fight to change all that.
In January, artists including Andersen and Ortiz filed a class-action lawsuit against DreamUp, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, three image-generating AI models programmed with art found online.
Andersen told AFP she felt "violated" when first she saw an AI drawing that copied the style of her "Fangs" comic book work.
She fired off an indignant reaction on Twitter; it went viral, and other incensed artists reached out to her with stories of their own.
Backers of the suit hope to establish legal precedent governing generative AI models that copy artists' styles.
Artists want AI creators to be required to secure permission for works used in training software, with an option to remove it.
They also want suitable compensation.
"There is room for a conversation about what that would look like," said Ortiz.
Compensation could take the form of a licensing model, she mused, and would need to be appropriate.
It would be wrong for artists to "get a couple of cents while the company gets millions" of dollars, added Ortiz, whose resume includes working for Marvel Studios.
Cheap and easy
On social networks, artists are sharing tales of jobs being lost to generative AI.
The suit notes that a video-game designer named Jason Allen last year won a Colorado State Fair competition with art created using Midjourney.
"Art is dead, dude. It's over. AI won. Humans lost," Allen was quoted as telling The New York Times.
The Mauritshuis Museum in the Netherlands sparked controversy by displaying an AI-generated image inspired by Vermeer's "Girl With a Pearl Earring."
The San Francisco Ballet, meanwhile, caused a stir by using Midjourney to generate illustrations used in promotional material for "Nutcracker" performances in December.
"It's sort of a natural consequence of something being easy and cheap and accessible," Andersen said.
"Of course they are going to use that option, even if it is unethical," she added.
AI companies named in the lawsuit did not respond to requests for comment.
Stability AI founder and chief executive Emad Mostaque has portrayed generative software as a "tool" that can tend to "mundane image output" and provide new ways "of ideating for artists."
Mostaque contends that it will allow more people to become artists.
Critics disagree. When a person prompts software to draw in the style of a master, they say, it does not make that person an artist.
Mostaque has said that if people choose to use generative AI unethically or to break the law, "that's their problem."
Death of creativity?
Companies defending themselves from artists' copyright claims are likely to claim "fair use," an exception sometimes allowed when a new spin is put on a creation or when it is only briefly excerpted.
"The magic word used in the US court system is 'transformative,'" said lawyer and developer Matthew Butterick.
"Is this a new use of the copyrighted work, or does it replace the original in the marketplace?"
Artists are turning not just to the courts but to technology to defend themselves against generative AI.
Prompted by artists, a team at the University of Chicago last week launched their "Glaze" software to help protect original works.
The program adds a layer of data over images that, while invisible to the human eye, "acts as a decoy" for AI, said Shawn Shan, the doctoral student in charge of the project.
That still leaves the onus on artists to adopt Glaze. Butterick predicts a "cat-and-mouse game" as AI makers figure out ways around such defenses.
Butterick also worries about the effect of AI on the human spirit.
"When science fiction imagines the AI apocalypse, it's something like robots coming over the hill with laser guns," he said.
"I think the way AI defeats humanity is more where people just give up and don't want to create new things, and (it) sucks the life out of humanity."
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