Robert Mueller outlined the conclusions of his report and made clear, in his own obtuse way, that the next steps belong to Congress.
from Wired http://bit.ly/2XdIlY9
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Intro Video
Wednesday, May 29, 2019
Teaching language models grammar really does make them smarter
Voice assistants like Siri and Alexa can tell the weather and crack a good joke, but any 8-year-old can carry on a better conversation.
The deep learning models that power Siri and Alexa learn to understand our commands by picking out patterns in sequences of words and phrases. Their narrow, statistical understanding of language stands in sharp contrast to our own creative, spontaneous ways of speaking, a skill that starts developing even before we are born, while we're still in the womb.
To give computers some of our innate feel for language, researchers have started training deep learning models on the grammatical rules that most of us grasp intuitively, even if we never learned how to diagram a sentence in school. Grammatical constraints seem to help the models learn faster and perform better, but because neural networks reveal very little about their decision-making process, researchers have struggled to confirm that the gains are due to the grammar, and not the models’ expert ability at finding patterns in sequences of words.
Now psycholinguists have stepped in to help. To peer inside the models, researchers have taken psycholinguistic tests originally developed to study human language understanding and adapted them to probe what neural networks know about language. In a pair of papers to be presented in June at the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics conference, researchers from MIT, Harvard University, University of California, IBM Research, and Kyoto University have devised a set of tests to tease out the models’ knowledge of specific grammatical rules. They find evidence that grammar-enriched deep learning models comprehend some fairly sophisticated rules, performing better than models trained on little-to-no grammar, and using a fraction of the data.
“Grammar helps the model behave in more human-like ways,” says Miguel Ballesteros, an IBM researcher with the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, and co-author of both studies. “The sequential models don’t seem to care if you finish a sentence with a non-grammatical phrase. Why? Because they don’t see that hierarchy.”
As a postdoc at Carnegie Mellon University, Ballesteros helped develop a method for training modern language models on sentence structure called recurrent neural network grammars, or RNNGs. In the current research, he and his colleagues exposed the RNNG model, and similar models with little-to-no grammar training, to sentences with good, bad, or ambiguous syntax. When human subjects are asked to read sentences that sound grammatically off, their surprise is registered by longer response times. For computers, surprise is expressed in probabilities; when low-probability words appear in the place of high-probability words, researchers give the models a higher surprisal score.
They found that the best-performing model — the grammar-enriched RNNG model — showed greater surprisal when exposed to grammatical anomalies; for example, when the word “that” improperly appears instead of “what” to introduce an embedded clause; “I know what the lion devoured at sunrise” is a perfectly natural sentence, but “I know that the lion devoured at sunrise” sounds like it has something missing — because it does.
Linguists call this type of construction a dependency between a filler (a word like who or what) and a gap (the absence of a phrase where one is typically required). Even when more complicated constructions of this type are shown to grammar-enriched models, they — like native speakers of English — clearly know which ones are wrong.
For example, “The policeman who the criminal shot the politician with his gun shocked during the trial” is anomalous; the gap corresponding to the filler “who” should come after the verb, “shot,” not “shocked.” Rewriting the sentence to change the position of the gap, as in “The policeman who the criminal shot with his gun shocked the jury during the trial,” is longwinded, but perfectly grammatical.
“Without being trained on tens of millions of words, state-of-the-art sequential models don’t care where the gaps are and aren’t in sentences like those,” says Roger Levy, a professor in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and co-author of both studies. “A human would find that really weird, and, apparently, so do grammar-enriched models.”
Bad grammar, of course, not only sounds weird, it can turn an entire sentence into gibberish, underscoring the importance of syntax in cognition, and to psycholinguists who study syntax to learn more about the brain’s capacity for symbolic thought.“Getting the structure right is important to understanding the meaning of the sentence and how to interpret it,” says Peng Qian, a graduate student at MIT and co-author of both studies.
The researchers plan to next run their experiments on larger datasets and find out if grammar-enriched models learn new words and phrases faster. Just as submitting neural networks to psychology tests is helping AI engineers understand and improve language models, psychologists hope to use this information to build better models of the brain.
“Some component of our genetic endowment gives us this rich ability to speak,” says Ethan Wilcox, a graduate student at Harvard and co-author of both studies. “These are the sorts of methods that can produce insights into how we learn and understand language when our closest kin cannot.”
from MIT News http://bit.ly/2MhfL7g
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Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms signs legislation to official close jail
On Tuesday morning, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms signed legislation to close the Atlanta City Detention Center, after a declining number of inmates and rising costs to run it became an issue.
—Clarence Thomas warns that a Supreme Court face off on abortion rights is coming soon—
“What better place to offer opportunity and access to equity than right here in the heart of downtown,” said Mayor Bottoms said. “It is my hope that we formulate, formally take this step to form the committee and commission that will give us input, public input on what this jail will be and what it will offer to the public.”
The jail now holds approximately 70 to 100 inmates per night, WSBTV reports.
“It has always been my goal to close this jail,” Bottoms said at a news conference previously.
“By repurposing this jail, by reimagining what this space is, we are giving people the opportunity to access tools and resources on the front in, so they have the tools for better decision making,” the mayor said.
Marilynn Winn is an activist who started a group who advocated for years to have the 400,000 square foot facility closed down. Winn said most people were locked up for frivolous reasons.
“Most people in this jail are in here for traffic violation, spitting on the sidewalk, peeing on the sidewalk. Nobody needs to go to jail for that, and that’s the first step for getting a record and the barriers fly up,” Winn said.
—#PicnicWhileBlack: Angry white woman points gun at Black couple enjoying Mississippi lake—
Under the Mayor’s Criminal Justice Reform Platform, Bottoms is working to help non-violent criminals get a hand up by offering vocational training while in jail that could translate into a job when they are released, reports CBS46.
The program is called PAT: Preparing Adult offenders through Treatment, Therapy and Training and so far eight men have been hired in the city’s Watershed Department and more than a dozen other inmates are waiting to go through the program’s pipeline.
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Sensor-packed glove learns signatures of the human grasp
Wearing a sensor-packed glove while handling a variety of objects, MIT researchers have compiled a massive dataset that enables an AI system to recognize objects through touch alone. The information could be leveraged to help robots identify and manipulate objects, and may aid in prosthetics design.
The researchers developed a low-cost knitted glove, called “scalable tactile glove” (STAG), equipped with about 550 tiny sensors across nearly the entire hand. Each sensor captures pressure signals as humans interact with objects in various ways. A neural network processes the signals to “learn” a dataset of pressure-signal patterns related to specific objects. Then, the system uses that dataset to classify the objects and predict their weights by feel alone, with no visual input needed.
In a paper published today in Nature, the researchers describe a dataset they compiled using STAG for 26 common objects — including a soda can, scissors, tennis ball, spoon, pen, and mug. Using the dataset, the system predicted the objects’ identities with up to 76 percent accuracy. The system can also predict the correct weights of most objects within about 60 grams.
Similar sensor-based gloves used today run thousands of dollars and often contain only around 50 sensors that capture less information. Even though STAG produces very high-resolution data, it’s made from commercially available materials totaling around $10.
The tactile sensing system could be used in combination with traditional computer vision and image-based datasets to give robots a more human-like understanding of interacting with objects.
“Humans can identify and handle objects well because we have tactile feedback. As we touch objects, we feel around and realize what they are. Robots don’t have that rich feedback,” says Subramanian Sundaram PhD ’18, a former graduate student in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). “We’ve always wanted robots to do what humans can do, like doing the dishes or other chores. If you want robots to do these things, they must be able to manipulate objects really well.”
The researchers also used the dataset to measure the cooperation between regions of the hand during object interactions. For example, when someone uses the middle joint of their index finger, they rarely use their thumb. But the tips of the index and middle fingers always correspond to thumb usage. “We quantifiably show, for the first time, that, if I’m using one part of my hand, how likely I am to use another part of my hand,” he says.
Prosthetics manufacturers can potentially use information to, say, choose optimal spots for placing pressure sensors and help customize prosthetics to the tasks and objects people regularly interact with.
Joining Sundaram on the paper are: CSAIL postdocs Petr Kellnhofer and Jun-Yan Zhu; CSAIL graduate student Yunzhu Li; Antonio Torralba, a professor in EECS and director of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab; and Wojciech Matusik, an associate professor in electrical engineering and computer science and head of the Computational Fabrication group.
STAG is laminated with an electrically conductive polymer that changes resistance to applied pressure. The researchers sewed conductive threads through holes in the conductive polymer film, from fingertips to the base of the palm. The threads overlap in a way that turns them into pressure sensors. When someone wearing the glove feels, lifts, holds, and drops an object, the sensors record the pressure at each point.
The threads connect from the glove to an external circuit that translates the pressure data into “tactile maps,” which are essentially brief videos of dots growing and shrinking across a graphic of a hand. The dots represent the location of pressure points, and their size represents the force — the bigger the dot, the greater the pressure.
From those maps, the researchers compiled a dataset of about 135,000 video frames from interactions with 26 objects. Those frames can be used by a neural network to predict the identity and weight of objects, and provide insights about the human grasp.
To identify objects, the researchers designed a convolutional neural network (CNN), which is usually used to classify images, to associate specific pressure patterns with specific objects. But the trick was choosing frames from different types of grasps to get a full picture of the object.
The idea was to mimic the way humans can hold an object in a few different ways in order to recognize it, without using their eyesight. Similarly, the researchers’ CNN chooses up to eight semirandom frames from the video that represent the most dissimilar grasps — say, holding a mug from the bottom, top, and handle.
But the CNN can’t just choose random frames from the thousands in each video, or it probably won’t choose distinct grips. Instead, it groups similar frames together, resulting in distinct clusters corresponding to unique grasps. Then, it pulls one frame from each of those clusters, ensuring it has a representative sample. Then the CNN uses the contact patterns it learned in training to predict an object classification from the chosen frames.
“We want to maximize the variation between the frames to give the best possible input to our network,” Kellnhofer says. “All frames inside a single cluster should have a similar signature that represent the similar ways of grasping the object. Sampling from multiple clusters simulates a human interactively trying to find different grasps while exploring an object.”
For weight estimation, the researchers built a separate dataset of around 11,600 frames from tactile maps of objects being picked up by finger and thumb, held, and dropped. Notably, the CNN wasn’t trained on any frames it was tested on, meaning it couldn’t learn to just associate weight with an object. In testing, a single frame was inputted into the CNN. Essentially, the CNN picks out the pressure around the hand caused by the object’s weight, and ignores pressure caused by other factors, such as hand positioning to prevent the object from slipping. Then it calculates the weight based on the appropriate pressures.
The system could be combined with the sensors already on robot joints that measure torque and force to help them better predict object weight. “Joints are important for predicting weight, but there are also important components of weight from fingertips and the palm that we capture,” Sundaram says.
from MIT News http://bit.ly/2YZH9rV
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Why Women Are Called 'Influencers' and Men 'Creators'
Baltimore mayor makes Office of Civil Rights independent to avoid police conflict of interest
TheGrio has launched a special series called #BlackonBlue to examine the relationship between law enforcement and African-Americans. Our reporters and videographers will investigate police brutality and corruption while also exploring local and national efforts to improve policing in our communities. Join the conversation, or share your own story, using the hashtag #BlackonBlue.
Baltimore has a new mayor and things are already changing for “Charm City”.
The city’s new mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young announced on Tuesday the Baltimore Office of Civil Rights will now be a standalone agency, the Baltimore Sun reported.
The decision came about due to concerns of potential conflicts of interest between the board that investigates police misconduct and the attorneys involved.
“The public perception of independence is critical,” Young said at a news conference when discussing the new change.
One reason for the separation of the two is reportedly because the city’s law office also represents police officers in misconduct cases.
The offices previous director, Jill P. Carter, who was appointed to the state senate agrees with the mayor’s choice. “The staff from this office must be free to conduct unbiased investigations,” Carter told reporters Tuesday. “The executive leadership must be unencumbered by politics within city government and the boards and commissions must be permitted to act in the best interest of the people of Baltimore that they serve,” she said.
Carter also believes citizens should have the right to outside counsel if needed.“People must be able to trust that their claims will be fairly and vigilantly investigated and decisions made with integrity without conflict or political influence,” she said.
The board’s function is to hear complaints from civilians and conduct investigations of alleged police misconduct.
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Wisconsin basketball coach Howard Moore and his son released from hospital after fatal car crash that killed wife and daughter
University of Wisconsin assistant men’s basketball coach Howard Moore and his son are on the mend and have been released from the hospital after a tragic head-on collision claimed the lives of his wife and daughter last week.
—University of Wisconsin assistant basketball coach’s wife and daughter killed in head-on collision—
Moore and his 13-year-old son Jerrell are improving and have been released from the intensive care unit at University of Michigan Hospital following the tragic accident on Saturday.
According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Moore suffered three-degree burns to the left side of his body.
“Please continue to keep the entire family in your thoughts and prayers,” a statement from the university read.
Jennifer Moore, 46 and daughter Jaidyn, 9, were killed in the head-on crash with a vehicle driving the wrong way at about 2 a.m., near Ann Arbor, Mich., according to the Michigan State Police.
“I lost two – a daughter and a granddaughter,” Jennifer’s mother Vera Barnes told The Detroit News. “But I’m blessed to still have my grandson and my son-in-law.”
—Clarence Thomas warns that a Supreme Court face off on abortion rights is coming soon—
Jaidyn was reported dead at the scene while her mother was transported to University of Michigan Hospital, but was taken off life support Saturday afternoon.
The family’s dog was also killed in the crash.
According to authorities, 23-year-old Samantha Winchester, was driving the vehicle that struck the Moore family’s car.
Winchester was also killed and a toxicology report is pending.
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Through tears Gabrielle Union gives first ‘Golden Buzzer’ to blind and autistic man on America’s Got Talent
Gabrielle Union handed down her first Golden Buzzer on America’s Got Talent after a heartfelt act by a blind and autistic man left the panel of judges speechless.
Cardi B blings out her baby Kulture with $80k worth of jewels—
Union couldn’t contain herself when 22-year-old singer Kodi Lee delivered a performance that brought tears to her eyes
“I bawled. I cried probably from their first steps on stage,” Union told PEOPLE, speaking about Lee and his mom Tina.
“Kodi is blind and autistic. We found out that he loved music really early on. He listened and his eyes just went huge, and he started singing, that’s when I was in tears,” his mom Tina revealed to the judges.
“I realized he’s an entertainer. Through music and performing, he was able to withstand living in this world because when you’re autistic, it’s really hard to do what everybody else does. It actually has saved his life playing music,” Tina added.
Lee took the audience by surprise with his remarkable rendition of Donny Hathaway’s “A Song for You,” which he sang along with playing the piano.
“I’m a new judge this season and I’m also a new mom this year. It’s the toughest job I’ve ever had and the most rewarding job I’ve ever had,” Union said to Lee and his mom.
“You just want to give your kids the moon, the stars and the rainbows. Tonight, I’m going to give you something special,” Union said as she slammed down the Golden Buzzer as her gift to him.
—#PicnicWhileBlack: Angry white woman points gun at Black couple enjoying Mississippi lake—
Lee’s Golden Buzzer propels him straight to the finals in Hollywood.
Union also explained that she was always a fan of AGT and wanted to help facilitate people’s dreams.
“I was a fan of the show but as someone who receives no’s on a daily basis, I wanted to be a part of saying yes to somebody’s dreams,” Union says. “I don’t always get the yes’s that I want but it’s nice to be part of a show that is making dreams come true.”
The next episode of America’s Got Talent airs Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET on NBC.
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Nigeria Football Federation boss Amaju Pinnick ordered to appear in court
Robert Mueller on Russia probe “If we had confidence the president did not commit a crime, we would have said so”
Special counsel Robert Mueller, breaking a two-year silence on his investigation into ties between Russia and the Trump campaign, announced his resignation from the Justice Department on Wednesday so that he can “return to public life.”
Mueller’s statement was expected to be relatively brief, about eight minutes, and Attorney General William Barr was given a heads-up about what he would say, according to people who were not authorized to provide details on the record and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The statement came amid demands for Mueller to testify on Capitol Hill about his findings and tension with Barr.
Mueller and Barr have been at odds over the attorney general’s handling of the special counsel’s report on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and the possibility that Republican candidate Donald Trump’s campaign cooperated with the Russians’ efforts to help him win.
Mueller has remained a Justice Department employee since submitting the report in March, though the Justice Department has not said what work he has been doing.
Any public statement from Mueller would be extraordinary since his office has been famously tight-lipped throughout the investigation, and the special counsel himself has made no public statements since his May 2017 appointment. His spokesman has only rarely commented to confirm logistical or staff announcements, to announce the filing of public charges and to dispute one published report earlier this year.
House Democrats want Mueller to testify publicly, though no date or arrangements have been set, and it’s not clear that he will.
Mueller’s report into meddling in the 2016 campaign did not find that the Trump campaign coordinated to sway the presidential election. But, despite Trump’s repeated assertions to the contrary, it did not reach a conclusion on whether Trump had obstructed justice.
Mueller said in his report that he did not think it would be fair to publicly accuse the president of a crime if he was not going to charge him. A Justice Department legal opinion says sitting presidents cannot be indicted, and Mueller made clear in his report that that opinion helped shape the investigation’s outcome and decisions.
Barr has said he was surprised that Mueller did not reach a conclusion, and he decided with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein that the evidence did not support an obstruction of justice allegation.
Mueller, for his part, privately complained to Barr that a four-page letter the attorney general wrote summarizing his main conclusions did not adequately capture the investigation’s findings. Barr called Mueller’s letter “snitty” in congressional testimony this month in which he defended his decision to reach a conclusion on obstruction in place of Mueller.
Barr is currently in Alaska for work and is scheduled to participate in a round table discussion with local leaders in Anchorage later in the day.
A senior White House official said “the White House was notified” Tuesday night that Mueller might make a statement Wednesday.
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Call for nominations: MIT Media Lab’s Disobedience Award
The MIT Media Lab has opened the call for nominations for its third annual Disobedience Award. The $250,000 cash prize will go to a person or group to recognize individuals and groups who engage in ethical, nonviolent acts of disobedience in service of society. The award is open to nominations for anyone still living and active in any field, including the arts, academia, law, politics, science, and social advocacy. A diverse selection committee composed of experts in a wide range of fields will choose the winner(s) and finalist(s), who will be announced in November.
The criteria for the Disobedience Award include nonviolence, creativity, and personal responsibility: It’s about speaking truth to power, taking responsibility, and demanding systemic change.
“Disobedience can mean different things in different spaces,” says Media Lab Director Joi Ito. “Defying a formal process or deeply ingrained culture, such as we might see in academia and the sciences, looks very different from staging a nonviolent civil protest, or resisting political pressure. What these things have in common is moral courage, a willingness to take personal risk, and a commitment to a goal beyond personal gain.”
As head of the selection committee, Ito hopes to see nominations from around the world — from expected as well as unexpected quarters. Although the Disobedience Award was not intended to function as a popularity contest or commentary on specific controversies, Ito says, the annual nature of the award means that it will often reflect the zeitgeist of any given year.
Previous winners and finalists have included Mona Hanna-Attisha and Marc Edwards, physicians who fought to expose and correct the water crisis in Flint, Michigan; Tarana Burke, BethAnn McLaughlin, and Sherry Marts, three leaders of the #MeToo and #MeTooStem movements; the Standing Rock water protectors; a representative of the 2018 West Virginia teachers’ strike; and numerous advocates and defenders of immigrants’ rights and environmental protection.
Nominations can be submitted at mitdisobedienceaward.fluidreview.com.
from MIT News http://bit.ly/2KcfoIi
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Africa Cup of Nations: Wilfried Bony gets Ivory Coast call-up
Watch Robert Mueller’s Statement on the Russia Investigation
Super mom gives birth in car with dad driving and crying kids in the backseat in viral video
Moms are truly amazing as evidenced by a Nevada woman who went into labor in the front seat of a car as her husband made his way to a hospital,
In the video the mother’s other children sat in the backseat on pins and needles as mom pushed out her newborn baby.
—Cardi B blings out her baby Kulture with $80k worth of jewels—
The whole vehicle-based birth was recorded by the young son of Mike Anthony Addison and Rudy Napier, the mom in labor who was supposed to be going to the doctor for a final check-up.
Napier couldn’t make it to the hospital in time because the baby had ideas of her own about entering the world a little early. The couple’s 10-year-old son Jayden reportedly kept the camera rolling and caught the moment his little sister Jolee Lavergne Addison’s was born on Friday.
Addison realized the birth was so remarkable that he decided to post the video clip on social media. But little did he know that his child’s birth would become a viral sensation that has been viewed more than nine million times.
“I’ve never been through anything like that in my life, and I’ve done some crazy stuff!” momma Napier told Fox5 in Las Vegas.
Addison called the whole surprising ordeal a“BEAUTIFUL nightmare!!”
“Mike the baby’s coming out, Mike the baby’s coming out,” Napier tells her husband repeatedly as he tried to hurry to Henderson Hospital.
“No, she’s not,” he says in disbelief.
But after realizing Jolee was headed his way, Addison talked to his babygirl girl through the camera: “Hey Jolee, it’s your father. Just want to let you know you’re making a grand presence in my car.
Like a pro, Napier pulled Jolee out and held her close against her chest like it was effortless.
–#PicnicWhileBlack: Angry white woman points gun at Black couple enjoying Mississippi lake–
He also took a moment to thank the hospital staff for their support.
“I just want to take the time to thank the ENTIRE Henderson Hospital staff for all the great immediate help and hospitality they gave us from start to finish!!!!” he wrote on Facebook Saturday night.
The couple has now posted a fundraiser on Facebook to help them purchase a minivan for the growing family.
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Clarence Thomas warns that a Supreme Court face off on abortion rights is coming soon
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has sounded the alarm and predicted that Roe v. Wade will be challenged and the court will have to hear arguments about the abortion law, based on Indiana’s controversial 2016 abortion ban.
—2020 candidate Kamala Harris targets state abortion bans—
“Given the potential for abortion to become a tool of eugenic manipulation, the court will soon need to confront the constitutionality of laws like Indiana’s,” Thomas wrote in a 20-page opinion.
Thomas also determined in his evaluation that “further percolation” on the matter is needed.
On Tuesday, the justices let stand Indiana’s high court’s provision that aborted fetuses need to be buried or cremated. Indiana’s restrictive abortion law bans women from aborting a fetus based on its race, gender or disability and mandates a burial for aborted fetuses, but the justice invalidated that part for now, The NY Post reports.
That means that a showdown in the Supreme Court is on its way and the justice will have to eventually consider the law. Thomas wrote, “We cannot avoid them forever. Having created the constitutional right to an abortion, this Court is duty bound to address its scope.”
The Supreme Court’s ruling follows a massive push by Republican-led states to enact extreme abortion laws, putting forth a stranglehold on women’s reproductive rights and forcing a high court faceoff over Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to choose.
Georgia and Alabama are among the states that passed restrictive abortion laws in recent weeks.
—Trump claims Black Americans won’t vote for Joe Biden due to crime bill past—
In a 7-2 decision, the court determined that clinics must dispose of aborted fetuses as it would human remains. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor both dissented in their opinions. The decision overturns a lower court’s determination that a burial served no valid purpose.
It was decided that the decision would have no bearing on a woman’s right to seek an abortion.
The 2016 law was signed by then Indiana governor Mike Pence.
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The Secret to Soap Bubbles' Iridescent Rainbows
#PicnicWhileBlack: Angry white woman points gun at Black couple enjoying Mississippi lake
In yet another shocking #LivingWhileBlack encounter, a white woman who served as a campground manager in Mississippi pulled a pistol out on a Black couple who were eating and relaxing by a lake.
Now BBQ Becky’s pistol-packing cousin has been fired from her job.
—Michigan city will introduce ordinance outlawing calling cops on people based on race—
The mind-boggling encounter was caught on video on Sunday at the Kampgrounds of America in Starkville, north-east of Jacksonville, The Daily Mail reports.
Jessica Richardson pulled out her cell phone and recorded the irate woman approaching her and her husband with a gun in hand and chastising them for having a picnic in the park. The woman demanded that the couple leave the premises with their dog because they didn’t have a reservation – something Richardson said she didn’t know she needed.
The couple said they were told they did not have to be guests to enjoy the amenities at Oktibbeha County Lake and a woman at the front desk told them so.
The white-haired elderly granny with the gun can be seen with her gun drawn addressing the upset couple who told her multiple times she could have easily told them to leave without whipping out her weapon.
“This lady just pulled a gun because we out here and don’t have reservations,” Richardson says in the video that she posted on Facebook.
“The only thing you had to tell us was to leave, we would have left. You didn’t have to pull a gun.”
The woman retorts: “Well I’m just telling you you need to leave because it’s under private ownership. You can’t be out here.”
The manager then tucks her gun in her front pocket as she shooed the couple from the campgrounds.
Richardson took to Facebook to post about the harrowing ordeal saying “racism is alive and well.”
“Today was a beautiful day so my husband (who’s a vet), our 2 year old dog, and myself, decided to Google a lake to visit and have a picnic. We found a lake located in Starkville and decided to visit,” she wrote alongside the video.
“Not five mins later a truck pulls up and a white lady screams at us, she then jumps out of her truck with a gun… and proceeded to point it at the 3 of us, simply because we didn’t make reservations.
“After leaving, my husband stopped by the office and talked with her husband (they’re the property managers). The husband tells my husband that reservations aren’t needed for the lake.”
—Trump claims Black Americans won’t vote for Joe Biden due to crime bill past—
Kampgrounds of America released a statement saying: “KOA Inc. is aware of the situation that occurred Sunday, May 26th at the KOA franchise in Starkville, Mississippi,” they said in a statement.
“KOA is currently looking into the matter and reaching out to all of the parties involved. Kampgrounds of America prides itself on providing a welcoming, safe environment for everyone to enjoy the outdoors.’”
KOA has confirmed that the employee has been fired.
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