Notables.

Candace Owens explodes at Ted Lieu mid-hearing after he plays short clip of her Hitler comments…

Tensions at a heated House Judiciary Committee hearing on online hate speech boiled over on Tuesday, when conservative commentator Candace Owens accused Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., of distorting her comments on Hitler so flagrantly for the sake of a smear that he must "believe black people are stupid."

“In congressional hearings, the minority party gets to select its own witnesses," Lieu began. "Of all the people the Republicans could’ve selected, they picked Candace Owens. I don’t know Miss Owens; I’m not going to characterize her; I’m going to let her own words talk.”

Lieu then produced a cellphone and played a short clip of Owens' previous remarks at a conference in December, which were widely circulated in February: “I actually don't have any problem with the word 'nationalism.' I think the defintion gets poisoned by elites that want globalism. Globalism is what I don't want. When we say ‘nationalism,’ the first thing people think about — at least in America — is Hitler. You know, he was a national socialist, but if Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, OK then, fine. The problem is, he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalize. He wanted everyone to be German. …"

Owens' remarks echoed those of President Trump, who has repeatedly defended nationalism against progressive attacks that the concept is intrinsically racist.

Lieu then asked committee witness Eileen Hershenov: “When people try to legitimize Adolf Hitler, does that feed into white nationalist ideology?”

But Owens soon made clear she felt Lieu had intentionally misrepresented her views to drive a false narrative not just against Owens, but also Trump and Republicans in general.

“I think it’s pretty apparent that Mr. Lieu believes that black people are stupid and will not pursue the full clip in its entirety,” Owens said.

Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-NY., interrupted, telling Owens, “It is not proper to refer disparagingly to a member of the committee. The witness will not do that again.”

After clarifying that she had not, in fact, called Lieu stupid, Owens continued: "As I said, he is assuming that black people will not go and pursue the full two-hour clip. He purposefully cut off – and you didn't hear the question that was asked of me. He's trying to present as if I was launching a defense of Hitler in Germany, when in fact the question that was presented to me was pertaining to wheher I believed in nationalism, and that nationalism was bad.

"And what I responded is that I do not believe we should be characterizing Hitler as a nationalist," Owens said. "He was a homicidal, psychopathic maniac that killed his own people. A nationalist would not kill their own people. … That was unbelievably dishonest, and he did not allow me to respond to it."

"I think it’s pretty apparent that Mr. Lieu believes that black people are stupid."

— Candace Owens

More here.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/candace-owens-explodes-ted-lieu-hitler-comments

>>6114870

Here's reality as it REALLY is.

Fuckin' magnets, how do they work?

>>6114913

You got me!

Just think not too long ago Chinese agents nearly got THAT close to POTUS.

AND nearly managed to infect/access/steal all info pertaining to ongoing trade/security negotiations.

That God the nightmare scenario was avoided.

May He give the Security staff/details all wisdom, courage and intuition they need protecting POTUS in the future.

>>6115009

A big Q and BIG 'WE LOVE YOU!'

>>6115023

Notables.

Sad News.

2 veterans die by suicide at VA hospitals in GA over weekend.

Two veterans took their own lives in Georgia VA hospitals in non-related incidents over the weekend.

These two suicides come in the midst of an increasing number of veteran suicides and what the VA said is its “highest clinical priority,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

The first of the two suicides occurred Friday at the Carl Vinson VA Medical Center in Dublin in a parking garage. The second suicide happened Saturday at the Atlanta VA Medical Center in Decatur just outside the main entrance.

The VA has not yet released any information about the identity of either victim yet, however, an email from VA to the Georgia Department of Veterans Service did disclose that the Atlanta suicide victim was administered aid by the clinical staff and taken to Grady Memorial Hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival.

The email also stated, “This incident remains under investigation and we are working with the local investigating authorities. The family has been contacted and offered support.”

An undisclosed source said the victim was a 68-year-old male who had shot himself.

“Suicide prevention is VA’s highest clinical priority. We are working alongside dozens of partners, including [the Department of Defense], to deploy suicide prevention programming that supports all current and former service members — even those who do not come to VA for care,” the VA said in a statement to the AJC.

Back in 2013, audits at the VA hospital in Decatur connected negligence to the suicides of four veterans there who were denied mental health access.

From Oct. 2017 to Nov. 2018, there were 19 suicides on VA campuses, seven of which took place in VA hospital parking lots.

Eric Caine, director of the Injury Control Research Center for Suicide Prevention at the University of Rochester, said, “It’s very important for the VA to recognize that the place of a suicide can have great meaning. There is a real moral imperative and invitation here to take a close inspection of the quality of services at the facility level.”

https://americanmilitarynews.com/2019/04/2-veterans-die-by-suicide-at-va-hospitals-in-ga-over-weekend/

>>6114777

Aye Aye.

Notes.

Shanahan Touts Unity in Space-Force Pitch, But Disagreements Clearly Remain.

It’s a key week for proponents of the Trump administration’s space reorganization — and their detractors.

COLORADO SPRINGS, COLORADO — This was supposed to be a week in which Pentagon leaders would “share our thinking and lay out our unified, whole-of-government plan to ensure U.S. leadership” in space.

But less than an hour after Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan uttered those words, It became clear that deep disagreements remain about how to reorganize the U.S. military’s orbital operations.

In her own speech here, Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson warned about new plans to launch clouds of inexpensive satellites to augment larger ones that are more capable, yet ostensibly more vulnerable to jamming, cyber attack, or destruction by China and Russia.

“Launching hundreds of cheap satellites from the Earth as a supplement for the complex architectures where we provide…will result in failure on America’s worst day,” Wilson said.

She did not mention the new Space Development Agency by name, but her target was obvious to most of the thousands of military and commercial space professionals gathered at the annual Space Symposium.

More here:

https://www.defenseone.com/politics/2019/04/shanahan-touts-unity-space-force-pitch-disagreements-clearly-remain/156186/?oref=d-channelriver

WOW!

The Army Wants AI to Read Soldiers’ Minds.

A new study from the Army Research Lab may help AI-infused weapons and tools better understand their human operators.

In World War II, the Allies had a big problem. Germany’s new bombers moved too quickly for the anti-aircraft methods of the previous war, in which soldiers used range tables and hand calculations to line up their guns. Mathematician Norbert Wiener had a theory: the only way to defeat the German aircraft was to merge the gun and its human operators — not physically but perceptually, through instruments. As Weiner explained in the video below, that meant “either a human interpretation of the machine, or a machine interpretation of the operator, or both.” This was the only way to get the gun to fire a round on target — not where the plane was but where it was going to be. This theoretical merger of human and machine gave rise to the field of cybernetics, derived from the Greek term cyber, to steer, and the English term net, for network.

In the modern context, the merger of the human and the machine has taken on a new importance in the planning of warfare, especially as the U.S. and other militaries move forward with ever more autonomous weapons that function with the ruthless speed and efficiency of electronica but still require human supervision and control.

“Part of our vision is closing the loop between the system and the warfighter,” Mike LaFiandra, chief of the dismounted warrior branch at Army Research Laboratory, or ARL, said at a 2017 NDIA event. Let the system understand what’s happening with the warfighter, make that more a symbiotic relationship where the system is predicting based on this warfighter’s physiology, And the system knows because its been training with him for years, this is what we expect is going to happen soon and this is the specific mitigation strategy that that warfighter needs to do better.”

Army scientists last week published a new study in the journal Science Advances, showing the future of that exchange, the ability of machines to better understand their operators’ thoughts and intent based on what the operator’s brain is doing. The study explores how the brain shifts to different states, from distracted to ordered and aware, based on how different its regions are behaving and communicating with one another.

In particular, the paper looks at how the brain arrives at “chimera states,” in which several of its regions are focused on one task.

There is no good or bad chimera state, according to Jean Vettel, a co-author and senior neuroscientist at the ARL’s Combat Capabilities Development Command. But the chimera states do differ in terms of what’s optimal for different environments.

An optimal chimera state is one where the right parts of the brain are doing the right thing at the right time. Vettel compared it to when a person walks into a restaurant (the brain is the restaurant) and the hostess, the waiter, and the busboys are all focused, operating in sync, around the task of getting the person seated at a clean table, with a menu in hand, bread on the table, etc. The kitchen staff will have a role to play later and that’s when their undivided attention and focus will be important. But not at first. When things are synchronized properly, all the regions are focused on the right thing at the right time.

The work sought to show how “dynamical states give rise to variability in cognitive performance, providing the first conceptual framework to understand how chimera states may subserve human behavior.”

Understanding those alignments between the kitchen and the waitstaff and the customer is key to getting humans and computers to work together, which is critical to where the military wants human-machine teaming to go.

The goal isn’t just to understand how chimera states emerge generally, it’s to better map how they emerge in individuals, since all people are different. That’s what is going to make future AI-enabled assistants effective partners, whether asa targeting aids in a tank or software to sort through hundreds of hours of video-footage and tip off a human analyst when something important shows up. These future artificial entities will need to be able to read their individual human operators in a way that machines don’t today, since no two brains synchronize regions or transition between states in exactly the same way.

Illustrating what that looks like in terms of the way humans will operate with AI-enabled software in the future requires a different metaphor.

More:

https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2019/04/army-wants-ai-read-soldiers-minds/156147/?oref=d-mostread

The Future…

Rhythmic behavior is ubiquitous in complex systems, and a diverse set of research has examined how interacting system elements come together to form synchronized, coherent behavior across domains that span biological, social, and engineered settings (1). However, the emergence of complete system-wide synchronization might not always provide the best description of system dynamics. In many systems, states of partial synchrony have been observed, where a system organizes in separate domains of synchronized elements (2, 3). This is particularly true in the human brain, where patterns of neurophysiological activity evolve rapidly, showing transient domains of synchronization across subsets of brain regions (2). In the past decade, the rise of network neuroscience approaches (4) have demonstrated a foundational role for partial synchrony among separate cognitive subnetworks, where the underlying architecture of the brain ensures efficient integration of sensory input with stored knowledge while also segregating task-irrelevant information to support cognition (5). However, the fundamental principles and constraints that subserve the intricate timing and specificity of these time-evolving patterns of synchrony are not well understood (6).

The dynamical systems framework of chimera states offers a powerful tool to study the evolution of coherent and incoherent dynamics in oscillating systems such as the brain. A chimera state emerges when a system of oscillators evolves into two subsets of mutually coherent and incoherent populations (7). Although chimera states represent a natural link between coherent and incoherent dynamics (8), initially, they were found and explored only analytically in the networks of homogeneous phase oscillators (9, 10), and their relationship to real physical systems was unknown. It was not until almost a decade after their theoretical discovery that chimera states were demonstrated experimentally (11, 12), lastly establishing their connection with real-world systems. Subsequently, chimera states were studied in a variety of model systems under different coupling schemes, including global (13) and purely local (14) connections, and their presence in oscillating systems was found to be more abundant than previously thought (15) [for an overview of studies on chimera states, see the recent review by Panaggio and Abrams (7)]. Chimera states have also been found to emerge under the presence of noise (16) and in heterogeneous networks (17). Given these findings, in the past few years, new classifications of chimera states, such as multichimera (18), traveling chimera (19), and chimera death (20), have been defined on the basis of the specific spatiotemporal dynamics involved.

Because of its natural ability to describe patterns of partial synchronization, the chimera framework has an intuitive utility for augmenting our understanding of the brain. Patterns of synchronization between cognitive systems are thought to form the basis of cognition, and the interplay of synchrony among subsets of brain regions has been shown to be important both in normal brain function, for example, in the variability in task performance (5), and in the continuum between healthy and disease states (21). Recent work has speculated that similarities exist between chimera states and brain dynamics during unihemispheric sleep (7) and the transition to a seizure state in epilepsy (22). Fundamentally, these dynamics are the result of complex interactions between neuronal populations and are often modeled using networks of coupled oscillators. As a result, despite the intuitive similarities between chimera states and brain dynamics, much of the work relating chimera dynamics to neuroscience, thus far, has focused on understanding chimera states at the level of neuronal networks, using mathematical modeling of networks of individual neurons with fewer elements and/or simplified connection topologies (18, 23). Only recently have neuronal models been used to examine the possibility of the emergence of chimera-like states within large-scale brain networks derived from two well-characterized animal brains—Caenorhabditis elegans (24) and the cat cortex (25). However, even in these instances, the network connectivities were modified for simplicity. Thus, there remains a gap between studies of chimera states and applications to large-scale functional patterns of brain activity thought to underlie cognition. This largely reflects the computational complexity of modeling whole-brain dynamics and identifying an informative, yet simplified, model of cognitive processing.

Read the rest of this mind blowing report/study and consider the military applications with AI.

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/4/eaau8535

Notables.

Reining in Iran’s Scientists.

Last month, the U.S. Departments of State and Treasury announced new sanctions on Iran, in what amounts to a cautionary message to scientists in Iran who may consider working for the regime. In the announcement, the United States warned that any scientists lending a hand to the regime’s proliferation activities could find themselves on the losing end of a gamble they are making with their professional careers.

Specifically, the sanctions designated 31 individuals and entities under Executive Order 13382, which targets proliferators of weapons of mass destruction, WMD delivery systems, and their supporters. The 14 individuals and 17 entities designated are all linked to Iran’s Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research – also known by its Farsi acronym, SPND.

SPND, founded in 2011, has employed up to 1,500 individuals, many of whom continue to carry out dual-use research and development activities. These activities can be useful for developing weapons delivery systems. Further, SPND’s subordinate organizations spend millions of dollars each year on a broad spectrum of defense projects. SPND scientists perform proliferation- sensitive research and experiments, and SPND continues to use subsidiary organizations, front companies, and procurement agents to acquire dual-use items from third-country suppliers. Ominously, moreover, SPND’s is run by the former head of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Sanctioned individuals and entities, in addition to having any U.S. assets blocked, will be denied access to the U.S. financial system. Further, non-Americans who provide support to these individuals could also be subject to sanctions.

These designations are part of our ongoing campaign of unprecedented economic pressure to change the Iranian regime’s behavior.

Individuals working for Iran’s proliferation-related programs – including scientists, procurement agents, and technical experts – should be aware of the risks to which they expose themselves.

They may be subject to sanctions that would prevent them from doing things such as sending money to relatives in the United States. What’s more, their names will be linked to Iran’s WMD program, making them international pariahs. Iran’s next generation of scientists has two paths: they can use their skills pursuing noble work outside of the WMD realm, or they can work for Iranian proliferation organizations and risk being sanctioned.

While these sanctions continue the U.S. efforts to exert maximum pressure on the Iranian regime, the United States will continue to work in partnership with allied countries to prevent the global proliferation of WMD. We know from the recently revealed Iranian nuclear archive that the regime cannot be trusted with nuclear capabilities. And as long as Iran continues its proliferation activities, the United States will continue to address Iran’s proliferation and other malign behavior that threatens international peace and security.

About the Author: Mary Lindsay serves in the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation's Office of Strategic Communications and Outreach at the U.S. Department of State.

https://blogs.state.gov/stories/2019/04/09/en/reining-iran-s-scientists

It be habbenin' Arrrrr!

>>6115379

>1

Arrrr!

>>6115326

Posted 3 days ago.