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Man killed by Aurora officer was being robbed: police

A man killed by Aurora Police this week was being robbed when he pulled a gun on another man, triggering the police encounter that led to this death, the department said on Friday.

Police have said officers, who observed the bus-stop dispute on surveillance cameras, went to the scene early Wednesday morning after seeing the man pull a gun on someone. But in a Friday update, the department said someone was trying to steal the man’s backpack.

It was around 2:30 a.m. Wednesday at a bus stop in the Del Mar Parkway neighborhood. Officers were watching a camera overlooking the area near East Colfax Avenue and Havana Street when they spotted the dispute, police said.

“Officers immediately responded when they observed one of those men produce a firearm and point it at the other man. Officers arrived at the intersection and aired they were in contact with the armed man. Moments later, the officers aired shots had been fired. Only one officer discharged his firearm,” the Friday release reads.

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Thanks to government, Maui’s Lahaina fire became a deadly conflagration

The most destructive natural disasters are never 100 percent natural. Human choices, land use, and government policies play a big role in how harmful hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, flash floods, and wildfires are to the affected communities.

And after catastrophes like the wildfire that destroyed much of the historic Hawaiian city of Lahaina last week, it’s worth taking stock of how much of the disaster was the result not of natural or accidental factors, but of policies and institutions that can be changed.

Though details are still emerging, it’s becoming clear that government failure did much to make this disaster worse — and possibly even started it. While the so-called experts are blaming climate change — and in the process demanding that government grab even more power and authority ostensibly to someday give us better weather — the destructiveness of this fire was the product of an all-powerful and all-incompetent régime.

The specific origins of the fire are still being investigated, but there is much we already know. The city of Lahaina sits on the west coast of Maui, Hawaii’s second-largest island. It is surrounded by grassland, much of which the state owns.

Nearly a decade ago the Hawaii Wildfire Management Organization, a research nonprofit, warned the Hawaiian government that the area around Lahaina was extremely fire-prone due to frequent downslope winds, steep terrain, and dry grass. Little was done to address these risks. A subsequent report in 2020 added that an invasive species of exceptionally flammable grass was prevalent in the surrounding fields and that passing hurricanes created strong winds known to fuel wildfires on the islands.

Early last week, Hurricane Dora crossed the ocean south of Hawaii. By early Tuesday morning, August 8, winds as fast as sixty miles per hour were blowing down the slopes of the West Maui Mountains into Lahaina. Around sunrise, a large fault was detected in the power grid, indicating a downed power line. Twenty minutes later, the first reports of fire came in from the area around Lahainaluna Road, uphill and upwind from the city.

The area where flames were first spotted is full of electrical infrastructure, mostly operated by Hawaiian Electric, the state’s monopoly electricity supplier. This included a substation and a multitude of power lines. Most of the land in the area is owned by the State of Hawaii except for a parcel belonging to the estate of one of Hawaii’s last princesses. This parcel housed a solar farm supplying electricity to the Hawaiian Electric substation. Early last year, NPR published a glowing article about the solar project, praising it the direct result of government regulation crafted to help transition Hawaii to 100 percent renewable power by 2045.

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Taco Bell’s Push To Go Cashless is a Gateway To A Surveillance Society

Taco Bell’s recent announcement of transitioning to a cashless business model raises alarming concerns about privacy and civil liberties. While the company proudly touts its endeavor to become a fully digital establishment in the near future, it obscures the deeper implications for consumers.

The company’s aim to capitalize on impulse digital transactions over traditional cash exchanges might sound like a novel approach to modernize sales techniques. However, behind this facade lies a concerning benefit: to heavily surveil and monetize consumers’ preferences. Taco Bell’s new data platform, designed to analyze consumer behavior meticulously, embodies a step towards an invasive corporate oversight into what people eat, when, and how often.

Chris Turner, CFO of Yum! Brands, Taco Bell’s parent company, might express enthusiasm about the potential of this platform for “personalized marketing, joint branding, and future automation.”

Yet, such initiatives might just be a veneer for a more troubling reality – the erosion of consumers’ privacy.

Even more disconcerting is the potential societal exclusion this move could propagate. A cashless model marginalizes groups who predominantly rely on cash and prefer privacy.

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Biden Regime Declares War on Ceiling Fans to Fight “Climate Change” – Settles on Costly New Scheme that Could Put Small Manufacturers Out of Business

First the Biden regime came for your gas stove, then your dishwashers, then gas furnaces and then your water heaters.

Now the Regime is targeting for your ceiling fans, jeopardizing small businesses in the process. Like the other previous schemes, the primary purpose is to advance the Regime’s radical “climate change” agenda.

Fox Business reported Friday that the Department of Energy (DOE) is proposing a new rule that would require ceiling fans to be more “energy efficient.”

The DOE says that proposed rule, which is dated June 22, would save Americans “a significant amount” of energy.

DOE’s analyses indicate that the proposed energy conservation standards for ceiling fans would save a significant amount of energy.

As Newsweek reported, the comment period for the new rule closed on August 21 and the DOE is in the midst of reviewing all comments, data and information.

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Microsoft Files For a Face-Tracking Patent

A patent filed in the US shows that Microsoft is working on technology that would allow it to track a person’s face in a way so comprehensive that the device powered by the tech could be referred to as a “face reader.”

And it could be used for gaming, but also for tracking remote employees. And who knows what else in between.

Microsoft says it needs the patent approved to develop mixed reality headsets that would be cheaper yet better at “understanding” expressions on human faces.

The patent filing doesn’t go into many considerations other than those of a purely technical nature, and this in a nutshell is how the under-development technology works.

Currently, converters are used that are not only bulkier to render high resolution tracking but also cost more to manufacture.

Now Microsoft wants to replace this method of tracking with elements directly embedded, circumventing the need for converters, and also what’s referred to as processing circuit area.

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AI-generated art cannot be copyrighted, rules a US federal judge

United States District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell ruled on Friday that AI-generated artwork can’t be copyrighted, as noted by The Hollywood Reporter. She was presiding over a lawsuit against the US Copyright Office after it refused a copyright to Stephen Thaler for an AI-generated image made with the Creativity Machine algorithm he’d created.

Thaler had tried multiple times to copyright the image “as a work-for-hire to the owner of the Creativity Machine,” which would have listed the author as the creator of the work and Thaler as the artwork’s owner, but he was repeatedly rejected.

After the Office’s final rejection last year, Thaler sued the Office, claiming its denial was “arbitrary, capricious … and not in accordance with the law,” but Judge Howell didn’t see it that way. In her decision, Judge Howell wrote that copyright has never been granted to work that was “absent any guiding human hand,” adding that “human authorship is a bedrock requirement of copyright.”

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How the Victorian Education Department’s historical child sexual abuse scandal was hidden for decades

On June 27, 2019, the viewing areas of Melbourne’s County Court were a hive of nervous energy as Justice Gabriele Cannon arrived to deliver a sentence that would publicly account for the private sorrows of dozens of people in the room.

Slumped beside his defence counsel, a 78-year-old former primary school teacher who’d once sneered at his victims that they’d never be believed was now a diminished and defeated figure.

But it was not just the reputation of Vincent Henry Reynolds on trial that day.

Warning: This story contains details of child sexual abuse

The story presented of Reynolds’s career would soon be understood as a microcosm of the unravelling crisis of historical sexual abuse in the Victorian education system. It would reveal in granular detail the methods by which the Victorian Education Department had covered up the sexual abuse of children — methods that lawyers for survivors say have been identified in dozens of other cases. 

The catchwords for Cannon’s sentencing remarks were succinct and compelling: “historical sexual offending”; “42 charges”; “38 child complainants”; “period of offending about 31 years”; “abuse of power”; “gross breach of trust”; “brazen and prolonged offending”; “systemic failures in duty of care”.

Yet as disturbing as the raw numbers were, they sold short the devastation wrought by Reynolds’s decades of rampant abuse of children placed in his care at government-run schools, reflecting only the reported cases of those who’d both survived their ordeals and mustered the strength to endure the justice system’s lengthy and often dispiriting delays.

One after the other, survivors stepped forward to read victim impact statements to the court.

“The Education Department knew he was a sick child abuser, knew that he preyed on kids, but they turned him loose on me and my classmates, and on lots of other kids in country Victoria,” one of them would later say.

Survivors who’d spent decades negotiating their traumas alone now gathered as a collective, participating in the unfortunately rare experience of personally witnessing the comeuppance of their abuser.

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Grieving Mother Desperate For Answers After FBI Busts Down Door, Fatally Shoots Her Disabled Veteran Son in Pre-Dawn Raid

A family is desperately seeking answers after FBI agents busted down the door and killed their relative in a pre-dawn raid last week.

The FBI is refusing to tell a grieving mother why they showed up in armored vehicles at 6 am last Wednesday and fatally shot her son.

According to WBBJ, FBI agents showed up at a residence in Henderson, Tennessee to serve a man named Theodore Deschler an arrest warrant when things turned deadly.

A neighbor told WBBJ he woke up at 6 am after he heard a loud bang.

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John Kerry Says Climate Change Deniers are Part of a Dangerous Cult 

Biden’s Climate Czar John Kerry on Thursday angrily lashed out at so-called ‘climate change deniers’ and accused people who dared question the ‘settled science’ of being in a dangerous cult.

This type of dehumanizing language should be condemned.

Kerry made the remarks in Edinburgh, Scotland at The Signet Library on Thursday. He flew all the way to the UK the lecture the peasants on the climate crisis.

“Without facts or economics on their side, they flatly deny what is happening to our planet and what we must do to save it!” John Kerry said.

Kerry continued, “They incite a movement against what they falsely label ‘climate change fanaticism’ as they conveniently forget that the dictionary definition of a ‘cult’ is ‘the dismissal of facts in devotion to a lie.’”

“They lash out at the truth-tellers instead and label indisputable evidence as hysteria,” Kerry added.

John Kerry said climate change deniers are a danger to humanity.

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To Tackle Highest Housing Costs in the Country, Hawaii’s Governor Declares YIMBY Martial Law

The loss of life from the deadly wildfires on the Hawaiian island of Maui has been made even worse by the loss of shelter. Some 2,000 homes have been destroyed so far, leaving thousands more homeless or displaced.

The fire has only worsened an insufficiency of homes on the island and in the state more broadly. In Hawaii, median home prices are close to $1 million and regulations on adding new supply are incredibly strict.

Weeks before the fires, Democratic Gov. Josh Green had already proclaimed a statewide housing emergency with the purpose of slashing through all that regulation to get thousands of new homes built.

“We don’t have enough houses for our people. It’s really that simple,” said the governor at a press conference last month, where he promised “bold action to streamline processes for creating thousands of affordable housing units.”

Green is in fact taking bold action by suspending whole sections of state and local laws and regulations that relate to homebuilding.

Local governments are given far more flexibility to expedite housing approvals, while developers will have the chance to route around basically all existing regulations on home building to get housing projects approved.

It’s a radically deregulatory approach that’s received praise from across the political spectrum.

“This is probably the single most significant state-level action on accelerating housing production maybe in the whole country, maybe ever,” Sen. Stanley Chang (D–Honolulu) tells Reason.

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