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When Justice Singleton was growing up, her father, the late director, writer and producer John Singleton, didnt go out of his way to show her the movies hed made. For awhile she thought he was a football player because he used to talk about how he was drafted into the industry.

But when the now 27-year-old attended a summer program for incoming freshmen of color at Loyola Marymount University, the group was shown a movie of her fathers that shed never seen before Higher Learning, about the struggles of a group of freshmen at the fictional Columbus University in Los Angeles.

When you go on a campus as a black person, Justice Singleton says, it can be really fearful, eye-opening.

The slang, fashion and soundtrack may date Higher Learning as a distinctly 1995 product, but its striking how many of the topics that shape the film are still being grappled with on college campuses and in society at large. Higher Learning examines the rise of white nationalism among young men, the pervasiveness of rape culture, school shootings, racist policing policies, the high price of a university education, binge drinking, sexual fluidity and the treatment of minority athletes in college athletics.

Presaging the culture wars that followed NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernicks sideline protests just a few years ago, there is even a scene in which Fudge, a politically minded senior played by Ice Cube, asks track star Malik Williams, played by Omar Epps, whether he would stand for the national anthem at a football game if he was surrounded by an all-white crowd.

Omar Epps, left, and Laurence Fishburne as student and professor in John Singletons Higher Learning.

(Eli Reed / Columbia Pictures)

These issues are still so prevalent in our society, Epps says today, and [Singleton] was cognizant of all of it.

John Singleton celebrated his 27th birthday five days before the January 1995 release of Higher Learning. Despite his youth, it was already his third project for a major film studio.

Singleton, who died last year at 51 from a stroke, had established himself as a new and formidable talent in Hollywood when Columbia Pictures put out his debut feature Boyz N the Hood in July 1991. The movie received a rapturous response after it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, made over $57 million domestically off an estimated $6.5-million budget and earned the young filmmaker Oscar nominations in the director and original screenplay categories. Before Boyz reached theaters, critic Roger Ebert famously included Singleton as part of the vanguard of what he declared the black new wave. Columbias president Frank Price repeatedly compared Singleton to Steven Spielberg.

John Singleton during the shoot for Boyz N the Hood, which was released in 1991 and earned him an Academy Award nomination for directing.

(Aaron Rapoport / Corbis via Getty Images)

Singletons follow-up, Poetic Justice, was a road film and love story that starred Tupac Shakur and Janet Jackson. Bringing in $27.5 million, it wasnt as successful as Boyz, but Singletons career was still on the rise.

He pretty much had carte blanche, says Stephanie Allain, who was senior vice president of production at Columbia at the time. He could do what he wanted.

Tupac Shakur, left, and Janet Jackson as Lucky and Justice in John Singletons 1993 street romance Poetic Justice.

(Columbia Pictures)

What he wanted was to make Higher Learning, which was partly based on what the South-Central native witnessed during his time as a student at USC.

The film focused on Epps character Malik, an arrogant member of the track team who becomes increasingly attuned to the forces that shape the black experience in America. Ice Cubes character, Fudge, served as the films Afrocentric conscience. Laurence Fishburne portrayed political science professor Maurice Phipps. And rapper Busta Rhymes played a student who got into clashes for playing his music too loud.

Omar Epps, left, and Ice Cube in Higher Learning.

(Eli Reed/New Deal/Columbia Pictures/Kobal/Shutterstock)

Kristy Swanson, who had just starred in the titular role of the original Bufffy the Vampire Slayer movie (five years before the Joss Whedon TV series), played Kristen Connor, a nave Orange County-born woman who begins to explore feminist activism and her sexuality in the aftermath of a rape. Regina King was Kristens roommate, Monet; Jennifer Connelly played lesbian activist Taryn and model Tyra Banks was a track star who became a love interest for Malik.

Pivotal to the films conflict was Michael Rapaports character Remy, an awkward and lonely transplant from Idaho who joins a group of neo-Nazis led by Cole Hauser as Scott Moss. As the school year progresses, racial tensions increase among the student body, eventually exploding in violence.

To watch Singletons Higher Learning 25 years after its release is to watch a messy and often complicated movie. After all, it was trying to cover many messy and complicated subjects in just over two hours. Supposedly Singletons first cut was twice as long, though even that might not have been adequate time for all the ideas that the film attempts to digest.

This issue of tribalism and everybody separating into their little groups, its something that we might want to tease ourselves that weve gotten past in this country, but I feel like now more than ever, its pretty obvious that we havent, says Jay R. Ferguson, the Mad Men and Briarpatch actor who made his film debut in Higher Learning playing the frat boy Billy. Thats just a good reminder that its been going on for way too long and way before Higher Learning came out.

Laurence Fishburne, left, and Omar Epps in Higher Learning.

(Eli Reed/New Deal/Columbia Pictures/Kobal/Shutterstock)

Allain, who is preparing to produce the 92nd Academy Awards show with Lynette Howell Taylor next month, wasnt just one of the few black executives who worked at Columbia Pictures in the early 1990s, she was one of the few black executives in the entire film industry. She was responsible for bringing the Boyz N the Hood script and Singleton to Columbia, and shepherded his two subsequent movies at the studio. She also had a hand in launching the careers of Robert Rodriguez, Justin Simien, Sanaa Hamri, Craig Brewer and Darnell Martin, among others.

John basically taught me how to produce, how to protect the auteurs vision through a lot of arguments, Allain says. I worked for the studio, but I really worked for him too. John was a very persuasive guy. His passion and his intellect pulled you in. You wanted to be a part of it.

Singleton typically wouldnt start writing a film until he was finished with the one he was directing, but his ideas for Higher Learning were already forming as he worked on Poetic Justice. In 1992, the Los Angeles Times visited Singleton on the set of that film. In the midst of shooting, he was also emotionally contending with the Rodney King verdict and the riots that followed. He hinted that the conflicts within his hometown of Los Angeles would inspire his next project.

Its gonna be hard. Cause Im pissed off, he told writer Patrick Goldstein. Its going to be the first movie I do that has white characters. Because Im going to have to deal with a lot of bigger issues, economic issues, issues of class as well as race.

John Singleton on the set of his 1995 film Higher Learning.

(New Deal/Columbia Pictures/Kobal/Shutterstock)

The acclaim and box office success of Boyz N the Hood helped inspire an influx of what were then called hood movies films like Menace II Society and South Central. Just like the increasing popular strain of gangster rap, they purported to show the realities and repercussions of gang life, police brutality and the crack epidemic in L.A.s African American neighborhoods.

Dr. Todd Boyd, then a young professor who had recently moved to Los Angeles to join USCs film department, remembers it as a particularly exciting cultural time in the city. Black filmmakers were hot at that moment, he says. John was in the center of it. Spike [Lee] is from New York and his movies were New York movies But John brought a West Coast sensibility to it. When you consider how N.W.A and Ice Cube and [Dr.] Dre and Ice-T brought the West Coast into the hip-hop equation, John was doing the same kind of thing in film.

Since Higher Learning would be Singletons first movie without a predominantly black cast, it was perceived that there would be broader marketing possibilities and audience growth, which meant Columbia didnt hesitate when he brought them the concept.

Oh my God, they were happy, says Allain. Are you kidding? Theyre like, OK, we have some white people in this one! He was growing as a filmmaker and he felt like he had the ability to give voice to other characters.

As casting for the film began, the only actors attached were Ice Cube and King, who had made their film debuts in Boyz N the Hood. King, who won an Oscar last year for her role in Barry Jenkins If Beale Street Could Talk and recently starred as the detective at the heart of HBOs Watchmen, also played a supporting role in Poetic Justice, while Cube says he turned down the part that eventually went to Shakur in that film.

The offer to play Fudge in Higher Learning coincided with Cubes increasing interest in black history and the Nation of Islam. He was reading books by Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad, as well as learning about the history behind the Black Panthers and Los Angeles gangs. It was a highly political stage in my career, says Cube. I was ready to do a movie and put out a visual match to what I was rapping about.

Stephanie Allain, producer

At a time when shaved heads and close fades were the normal hairstyles for young African American men, the voluminous, throwback Afro that Cube sported in Higher Learning was a striking look. When [Singleton] told me about the character months before, I just knew I wanted to grow my hair out, he says. I wanted to make that statement that this guy is black on the inside and outside.

Fishburne had played Furious Styles in Boyz N the Hood, a role that was based on Singletons father. After Sidney Poitier and Dustin Hoffman turned down the role of the political science professor in Higher Learning, Singleton turned to Fishburne, who was only 34 at the time. Just seven years earlier he had played a student activist in School Daze, Spike Lees film set at another fictional college, the historically black Mission College in Atlanta. For Higher Learning, they aged Fishburnes appearance by whitening his hair and beard, but the actor developed his own distinctive approach to the character.

[Singleton] explained to me that it was kind of generational, the difference between the students point of view and this professors, Fishburne says. I thought about [how] Poitier was from the Caribbean and I thought that would be kind of the way in. I said, Lets make him West Indian, so at least theres a cultural difference.

Fishburne ended up basing his performance on his godfather Maurice Watson, an English and drama professor at Brooklyn College, who was responsible for getting him into acting as a child.

Epps part of Malik was originally going to be played by Shakur Singleton told Vibe magazine at the time that he wanted the two of them to have a creative partnership like Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese. But as the film went into production, Shakur faced charges of sexual assault that eventually sent him to prison. Epps, later known for his starring role in Love and Basketball and his long run on House, had broken through with the film Juice and had replaced Wesley Snipes in the sequel to Major League. Still, this film felt different. It was my first time working with a filmmaker who was just so entrenched into the story and the bigger voice of the film, says Epps, who most recently has been seen on NBCs This Is Us.

Even before the script for Higher Learning was done, Swanson, who was repped by the same agency as Singleton, reached out to meet with the director. Like the character she went on to play, Swanson is from Orange County.

Even though we were both from Southern California, we were able to talk about how we came from very different sorts of lives, Swanson says. There was a lot of humor in our conversation and getting a feel for each other. I could tell he was really studying me and how I spoke and what I had to say. She believes that their conversation ended up shaping the character, even down to her name, Kristen.

Swanson is now one of the entertainment businesss most vocal supporters of Donald Trump, waging daily campaigns on his behalf on social media and getting messages of gratitude from the presidents Twitter account.

As for the role of the skinhead Remy, there are conflicting accounts about whether Leonardo DiCaprio (post-Oscar nomination for Whats Eating Gilbert Grape but pre-global mega fame for Titanic) was at one point officially attached to the part. As shooting neared, Singleton and the casting agents considered Rapaport and Hauser for the role.

I had actually just done a role in a film called Skins where I played a skinhead, so I already looked the part, says Hauser, who is currently one of the stars of Kevin Costners Paramount Network series Yellowstone, and conducted the interview for this story while riding his horse, Duke. When I walked in and met John, he kinda looked at me and I think he really thought I was a skinhead.

Rapaport eventually got the part of Remy, while Hauser was cast as the head of the neo-Nazis, even though he was only 19 years old. The irony was not lost on either of the actors that they were both Jewish.

Before filming began, Singleton developed exercises for the actors to get more in touch with the roles they were playing. He had this thing he called character therapy, Swanson remembers. We sat in a circle almost like you would see at a group-therapy meeting, you know, Hi, my name is . That kind of a thing. Everybody spoke as their character in this therapy circle.

Though Hauser said he got along with cast members like Ice Cube and Busta Rhymes on the Higher Learning set, his physical appearance caused some uncomfortable moments.

John was one of those guys, especially early on, who was doing this more than anybody, where the crew is black down to the catering and the drivers. he says. He was doing a lot for the African American community, especially in Los Angeles at that time. So to be walking around with a shaved head, with tattoos of Invisible Empire on my neck, its not the most, I guess, inviting atmosphere.

Singleton also told Rapaport not to hang out with most of the cast when they werent filming in order to mirror the isolation his character feels. It was not an easy ask for unabashed hip-hop devotee. I was such a fan of Omar Epps and Busta Rhymes and Cube, says Rapaport, who over the years has been a near-constant film and TV presence, most recently as the dad in Netflixs Atypical. I remember Omar Epps had gotten an early copy of Nas first record, Illmatic. I remember walking by their trailer and they were listening to it and I was so jealous.

As the filming went on, the difficult subjects the story examined couldnt help but affect the tenor of the production. It always starts off very optimistic and fun, and then the acting starts to take over and gets you a little more serious says Cube. The more we did it, the more difficult it felt to shoot things. It felt like theres really lines in the sand and thats because you got good actors on all sides of the equation, and you got a director who understands that this tension can be used to bring out better performances.

Director John Singleton in July 2011.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

With his comedies Friday, Ride Along, Barbershop and their sequels still in the future, Cube, who at the time of Higher Learning was still actively making music in his post N.W.A career, says he learned everything about screenwriting and directing from Singleton. Hanging out together at Singletons home in Baldwin Hills, the filmmaker told Cube that if he could tell stories so well in his lyrics, he should be doing it in scripts. Singleton not only guided him toward buying his first computer and Final Draft screenwriting software, he coached him through several different scripts until he finished Friday.

Higher Learning was shot on the campus of UCLA during the first half of 1994. (USC denied Singletons request to film it at his alma mater.) Columbia Pictures released the film in January 1995. These days, January is known as a time studios dump the movies they dont have faith in, either critically or commercially, but the executives interviewed for this article say that wasnt the case for Higher Learning.

Nobody thought we better bury this, said Sid Ganis, Columbias then head of marketing who had also worked on Singletons previous films. Not at all.

The film opened on Martin Luther King Jr. weekend and made over $13 million, taking the second spot in the box office rankings, just behind Legends of the Fall. It eventually grossed $38 million in theaters more than Poetic Justice but less than Boyz N the Hood.

Response to Higher Learning was mixed. Critics admired Singletons desire to confront societal problems but felt he relied on too many clichs and shallow depictions to do so. As Kenneth Turan wrote in his review for the Los Angeles Times, Because he accomplished so much so early, it is easy to forget how young John Singleton is. Higher Learning reminds us.

Singleton spent this century specializing in action films like Shaft and 2 Fast 2 Furious. Baby Boy from 2001 marked the last of his so-called hood films. In 2017 he took a deeper look at the L.A. unrest that had initially inspired Higher Learning by producing the documentary L.A. Burning: The Riots 25 Years Later. And he returned to the Los Angeles of his youth as the co-creator of FXs series about the 1980s drug trade, Snowfall. His death came three months before the premiere of the shows second season.

Taraji P. Henson, left, and Tyrese Gibson in a scene from John Singletons Baby Boy.

(Eli Reed / Columbia Pictures)

Higher Learning ends with the word Unlearn appearing over the American flag before the screen fades to black. These days, similarly optimistic phrases of the era like Erase Racism and No Colorlines get little play in discussion of racial dynamics. The emphasis is on getting people to acknowledge the inherent prejudices and biases within themselves, then working to challenge them.

When Higher Learning was released, the Los Angeles Times held a screening of the film for 10 local college students. Afterward USCs Dr. Boyd moderated a conversation between them and Singleton. The director had only graduated a few years earlier, but already the students questioned why he didnt focus more on systematic racism and wondered why his film didnt include the experience of Latino and Asian students.

Recent incidents on college campuses, such as the May 2018 call to campus police by a white student about a black Yale graduate student sleeping in a residence halls common area, have forced the people of the United States to examine their own feelings and assumptions about race. In this political climate theres also been the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and white supremacist incidents, as well as a continued battle over U.S. immigration policies and affirmative action lawsuits, all forcing difficult but crucial conversations.

As Justice Singleton says, The way the world is, is kind of like a college campus now.

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The sex, gun and race issues presaged by a 1995 John Singleton film - Los Angeles Times

Ted Bundy's crimes were described by the judge presiding over his trial as "extremely wicked, shockingly evil and vile," a phrase that was later adopted by a movie about the serial killer starring Zac Efron.

However, the same judge also delivered a lesser publicized set of words that many still find profoundly troubling today.

"Extremely wicked, shockingly vile, and evil" only goes a short way to capture Bundy's atrocities. He exploited the fact that he was handsome and charismatic to win the trust of his umpteen victims, all young, beautiful girls, before knocking them unconscious and taking them to secluded locations to rape and kill them.

He was so brazen that he would openly approach his victims, often in broad daylight, by feigning injury or disability, and even impersonating an authority figure. Once he had them in his control, he would promise to release them if they didn't kick up a fuss, only to later kill them in cold blood.

He would sometimes revisit his secondary crime scenes, grooming and performing sexual acts with the corpses until decomposition and destruction made any further interactions impossible. He also decapitated at least 12 of his victims and kept some of their severed heads as trophies.

So, as one can imagine, when he was finally caught a third time in February 1978 his first two incarcerations in Colorado saw him engineer dramatic escapes and then commit further assaults in Florida after the horrific Chi Omega murders and his last victim 12-year-old Kimberly Leach, women across the country breathed a sigh of relief.

His highly publicized trial was covered by 250 reporters from five continents and was the first-ever to be televised nationally in the United States, something Bundy took glee in and saw as an opportunity to further promote his cult of personality.

Despite having four court-appointed attorneys on his side, Bundy routinely ignored their advice and took the defense into his hands, promptly making the trial into a sort of spectacle where he could show off the lawyer he always thought he could be.

However, his case was always doomed. Eyewitness testimony and a plethora of physical evidence meant the jury took less than seven hours to convict him of two counts of first-degree murder, three counts of attempted first-degree murder, two counts of burglary and recommended the death penalty.

Imposing the death sentence, Trial judge Edward Cowart delivered the words that have now almost been immortalized in pop culture.

"The court finds that both of these killings were indeed heinous, atrocious and cruel," he told Bundy. "And that they were extremely wicked, shockingly evil, vile and the product of a design to inflict a high degree of pain and utter indifference to human life."

However, his comments following that, as Bundy prepared to leave the courtroom, left many flabbergasted because it felt as though Cowart was almost sympathizing with the serial killer.

"Take care of yourself, young man. I say that to you sincerely," he said. "I say that to you sincerely; take care of yourself. It is an utter tragedy for this court to see such a total waste of humanity, I think, as I've experienced in this courtroom."

"You're a bright young man. You'd have made a good lawyer and I would have loved to have you practice in front of me, but you went another way, partner. I don't feel any animosity toward you. I want you to know that. Take care of yourself."

Amazon Studios' 'Ted Bundy: Falling for a Killer,' which premiered on January 31, criticized Cowart's handling of the case, with many taking issue with his kind words to a man who was responsible for the deaths of at least 30 women.

Reporters who were at the trial swear that they distinctly and categorically remember Cowart's words to Bundy after he was sentenced to death because of how taken aback they were by it.

"That he would say that to him with no concern for what these women actually experienced, it's almost like a homage to him," said Jane Caputi, a feminist scholar. "And that's a scary, scary thing."

'Ted Bundy: Falling for a Killer' has attempted to reframe Bundy's crimes from a female perspective, including those of his longtime girlfriend and her daughter, and highlighted how his psychological hatred of women seemingly collided with the feminist movement and culture wars of the 70s.

The docuseries can be streamed on Amazon Prime.

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Ted Bundy was so charming that even the judge who gave him death sentence complimented him - MEAWW

U.S. Attorney General William Barr clapped back at leftwing hysteria over his support of the First Amendment Tuesday in an interview with Cardinal Timothy Dolan on Sirius XM.

I feel today religion is being driven out of the marketplace of ideas and theres a organized militant secular effort to drive religion out of our lives, Barr told Dolan. To me the problem today is not that religious people are trying to impose their views on nonreligious people, its the opposite its that militant secularists are trying to impose their values on religious people and theyre not accommodating the freedom of religion of people of faith.

Since developing similar ideas in depth in several public talks, Barr has been the subject of a series of hit pieces in publications including The New York Times and The New Yorker. Its not just his full-throated defense of the natural right to obey ones conscience above ones government that gets their goat. Barrs concern for the rule of law, fair play, and due process especially about Russian collusion and impeachment have also brought out the knives.

A particularly unhinged and error-riddled 10,000-word New Yorker article by David Rohde may have made one accurate assessment: Barr is the most feared, criticized, and effective member of Trumps Cabinet. There is certainly some relationship between the lefts fear and the rights effectiveness, and thus the neutering attempts. As Sohrab Amari noted, Barr has been ridiculously labeled an extremist Catholic associated with a secretive, ultra-orthodox Catholic sect.

Of course, the point of flak like this is to polarize the target and thus make him ineffective through clouds of mistrust. A parallel effort has been underway much longer against the nations first freedom: the duty to obey God before men. Thus in her own attack article against Barr last month in The New York Times, Katherine Stewart put the words religious liberty and religious freedom in scare quotes, even though these are longstanding natural rights that enjoy U.S. legal protection for very good reasons that include staunching bigotry. The ignorant scare quotes are becoming common in even outlets that style themselves objective news sources.

[I]t is illuminating to review how Mr. Barr has directed his Justice Department on matters concerning the First Amendment clause forbidding the establishment of a state religion, Stewart writes:

In Maryland, the department rushed to defend taxpayer funding for a religious school that says same-sex marriage is wrong. In Maine, it is defending parents suing over a state law that bans religious schools from obtaining taxpayer funding to promote their own sectarian doctrines.

In these and other cases, Mr. Barr has embraced wholesale the religious liberty rhetoric of todays Christian nationalist movement. When religious nationalists invoke religious freedom, it is typically code for religious privilege. The freedom they have in mind is the freedom of people of certain conservative and authoritarian varieties of religion to discriminate against those of whom they disapprove or over whom they wish to exert power.

Stewart makes an error of omission in her description of the First Amendment. The clause concerning religion reads, in full: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. A full quotation undoes her conclusion that the Constitution prohibits religious people from equal access to public funds. That is not only historically and legally inaccurate, its obviously textually inaccurate from any unbiased persons plain reading.

In other words, shes doing exactly what Barr says shes doing, while pretending that she is not. Stewart is making a secular effort to drive religion out of our lives and trying to impose her values on religious people while not accommodating the freedom of religion of people of faith. Her values say that only pagans people with atheist, pantheist, syncretist, or agnostic religious beliefs may fully access public goods. People with theistic religious beliefs may not. This is not equality or tolerance it is prejudice.

Mr. Barrs constitutional interpretation is simply window dressing on his commitment to religious authoritarianism, writes Stewart, smugly. No, maam: Your constitutional interpretation is simply window dressing on your commitment to religious authoritarianism. Barr acknowledges himself not free to do whatever he wants i.s. be an authoritarian by binding himself to a religion that checks his worst impulses and dictates the right way to treat other people, which includes respecting their sometimes very differing consciences.

The secularists Stewart represents just refuse to acknowledge that their religious beliefs are in fact religious beliefs, and of a far creepier and deadlier kind than Christians. What is, for example, the belief that human beings can have the female mind embedded in a male body, if not a religious belief? In a materialistic religious view, how is it even possible to have a gendered mind? Is gender solely a product of chemicals? If not, what else could it be for people who do not admit to a nonmaterial realm?

Further, what is more cultish than forcing people to believe through social pressure, law, and other means that a man is a woman is a man is a woman? What is more totalitarian than to force people to pretend that males and females are interchangeable inside the relationship whose major function in society is to spend half a livetime cultivating happy, competent citizens starting at conception?

Or what is, for another example, the belief that it is possible to fix the world by applying government pressure? That is not a belief that can be wholly validated by research or experience. In fact, research and experience both indicate that central planning usually makes life even more nasty, brutish, and short.

So what is this unfounded, undocumented, unprovable faith in government power to correct human psyches and behavior if not a religious (metaphysical) belief? It is also an unprovable and metaphysical belief about what a human is a thing that can be corrected by politics and whose error is not intrinsic to itself. Again, these are all metaphysical, religious beliefs with no empirical basis or possibility of being fully empirically proven.

It is quite simply a lie to say that atheism is not a religious belief. It cannot be empirically documented that there is no God. For one thing, nobody has visited the outermost reaches of the universe in an attempt to find Him, assuming that is a way He could be found. It is simply an assumption, a religious assumption, that an atheist makes.

And thats fine. Christians arent the ones who have a problem with people making religious assumptions. The secular, pagan, atheist types are the ones who claim religious assumptions are evil. They do so because they erroneously believe they are free from such assumptions. But in truth, no one is.

It has been long convenient for secularists to insist that it is possible for government to be neutral about religion by imposing their religion on everyone. But this is a falsehood, and its falsity is ever more obvious in todays culture wars, which are increasingly divided according to whether one believes in a deity and, by extension, an objective standard outside oneself or not. The culture war is in fact a religious war between relativism and orthodoxy, between the belief that truth is subjective and the belief that truth is objective, knowable, independent of ones opinions about it, and merits reverence.

This is very clear when one reads the attacks on Barr or on any orthodox position or person. Barr is just a representative of the half of America that believes in natural rights, in a written Constitution that restrains the government, and a God whose universe is explicable, orderly, and undergirds the whole shebang. Those who embrace a living Constitution, on the contrary, despise external rules, order, and anything else that might work to limit their passions, which they sometimes style politics. These are the two polar opposite metaphysical positions that drive our culture clash.

Far worse than the rule of law is the rule of the powerful over the weak. Far worse than the law of God are the so-called laws of men. On one side is freedom. On the other is totalitarianism. It is no irony that the real totalitarians project the label their position deserves onto opponents as a smear.

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Barr: The People Trying To 'Impose Their Values' Are 'Militant Secularists' - The Federalist

52,119 views|Jan 31, 2020,8:06 pm

Beth Kindig publishes a free newsletter on tech stocks at Beth.Technology and runs a premium research service for stock investors. She is a San Francisco-based technology analyst with more than a decade of experience in analyzing private and public technology companies.

Artificial intelligence is frequently discussed yet its too early to show real gains. AIs major headwind is the cost of the investment, which will skew returns in the short-term. When the turnaround occurs, however, companies who are making the investment can expect to be rewarded disproportionately with a wide performance gap. In a recent report,McKinsey predicts AI leaders will see up to double the cash flow.

We can see some evidence of this in Alphabets revenue segment, Other Bets, which includes many AI projectswith a loss of $3.35 billion in 2018. Of this,Deep Mind is responsible for $571 million in losses and owes its parent company $1.4 billion. The autonomous driving project, Waymo, had its valuationcut by 40% due to delays last September.

We see other companies taking on massive and expensive AI projects, such as Baidu, Facebook, Tesla, Alibaba, Microsoft and Amazon. Except for Tesla, these companies are flush with cash and can afford the transition costs and capital expenditures required for artificial intelligence.

Despite tech giants pouring cash into AI investments, most of the industries that stand to benefit are not in the tech industry, per se. This week, I attended Re-Works Deep Learning and AI Summit, where AI engineers and executives gathered for presentations and discussions about the projects theyre spearheading.

Here are a few ways that AI is slated to make an impact sooner rather than later:

The next decade will determine if humans or machines are better are making a medical diagnosis as more health care companies turn to AI for accuracy. One problem that Curai is working on, is how to train a model to know when it doesnt know, so a human can intervene to avoid the misclassification of unknown diseases. This approach is known as physician-in-the-loop.

Learning and Drug Discovery at Re:Work Deep Learning and AI Summit

Beth Kindig / Re:Work Deep Learning and AI Summit

United Health received 36 million calls in 2017 with 7.6 million calls transferred to a representative. The AI platform solution involves deep learning for a pre-check portal and claim queue, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) to translate audio to text, and Natural Language Processing (NLP) for unsupervised clustering, to generate new call variables and automate transfer calls.

Retail had a large presence at the conference with Wal-Mart Labs, Proctor and Gamble and Target presenting on ways they plan to make the retail experience more optimized. Perhaps these companies are being more careful to embrace technology and AI after the last decade ushered in many competitors who stole critical turf (i.e. Amazon).

Imagine a shopping experience where the carts are plentiful, cashiers are always open, and inventory is fully stocked. Rather than focus on replacing cashiers, Wal-Mart is more focused on inventory control. This is a different approach than competitor Amazon Go, designed to be cashier-less.

Privacy has been in the headlines lately as regulators and social media users begin to question what is a fair exchange for a free service. While the battle is nearing two years since Cambridge Analytica, other companies are creating AI recommendation engines so powerful that little information is needed about the person making the choice; their preference is enough to determine what to recommend next.

Netflix is a leader here with its recommendation engine for content. Pinterest also employs a complex recommendation engine to surface the best image for an individual out of the billions of images on Pinterests platform. This is done through the process of query understanding to candidate generation to ranking to blending to the final result. In laymans terms, this is how a discovery engine narrows down choices from billions to hundreds.

Over the next few years, we will become hands-free and will have better posture and fewer car accidents. Once AI-assistants are fully built out, our interaction with mobile devices may become the brunt of criticism from future generations. Many companies are working to own this space as the ecosystem lock-in and data produced by AI-assistants will be incredibly valuable expect a full-fledged battle between Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple in this space.

Beth Kindig is a technology analyst who publishes weekly atbeth.technologyand runs a premium service for serious tech investors.

Beth predicted the biggest stock drop

Beth Kindig is a technology analyst who publishes weekly atbeth.technologyand runs a premium service for serious tech investors.

Beth predicted the biggest stock drop in history in Q2 2018 with Facebook's miss and the biggest IPO loss in history with Uber in Q2 2019. She invested in Roku from its IPO for a 1,000% gain and she is known for having a crystal ball on Twitter. Her experience comes from a decade of analyzing tech companies, tech products and startups resulting in over 700 articles and many enterprise-level analyst reports. She speaks frequently at tech conferences covering macro trends and has a tech podcast in the Top 40 for technology on iTunes and Spotify.She works in San Francisco and Silicon Valley as a data technology evangelist with over 7 years of experience in mobile and data. She has been published in many publications including VentureBeat, MediaPost, AdExchanger and the International Association of Privacy Professionals. She has written Quarterly Data Reports on technology since 2014.

Original post:
5 Soon-to-Be Trends in Artificial Intelligence And Deep Learning - Forbes

Graham Allison alerts us to artificial intelligence being the epicenter of todays superpower arms race.

Drawing heavily on Kai-Fu Lees basic thesis, Allison draws the battlelines: the United States vs. China, across the domains of human talent, big data, and government commitment.

Allison further points to the absence of controls, or even dialogue, on what AI means for strategic stability. With implied resignation, his article acknowledges the smashing of Pandoras Box, noting many AI advancements occur in the private sector beyond government scrutiny or control.

However, unlike the chilling and destructive promise of nuclear weapons, the threat posed by AI in popular imagination is amorphous, restricted to economic dislocation or sci-fi depictions of robotic apocalypse.

Absent from Allisons call to action is explaining the so what?why does the future hinge on AI dominance? After all, the few examples (mass surveillance, pilot HUDs, autonomous weapons) Allison does provide reference continued enhancements to the status quoincremental change, not paradigm shift.

As Allison notes, President Xi Jinping awoke to the power of AI after AlphaGo defeated the worlds number one Go human player, Lee Sedol. But why? What did Xi see in this computation that persuaded him to make AI the centerpiece of Chinese national endeavor?

The answer: AIs superhuman capacity to think.

To explain, lets begin with what I am not talking about. I do not mean so-called general AIthe broad-spectrum intelligence with self-directed goals acting independent of, or in spite of, preferences of human creators.

Eminent figures such as Elon Musk and Sam Harris warn of the coming of general AI. In particular, the so-called singularity, wherein AI evolves the ability to rewrite its own code. According to Musk and Harris, this will precipitate an exponential explosion in that AIs capability, realizing 10,000 IQ and beyond in a matter of mere hours. At such time, they argue, AI will become to us what we are to ants, with similar levels of regard.

I concur with Sam and Elon that the advent of artificial general superintelligence is highly probable, but this still requires transformative technological breakthroughs the circumstances for which are hard to predict. Accordingly, whether general AI is realized 30 or 200 years from now remains unknown, as is the nature of the intelligence created; such as if it is conscious or instinctual, innocent or a weapon.

When I discuss the AI arms race I mean the continued refinement of existing technology. Artificial intelligence that, while being a true intelligence in the sense of having the ability to self-learn, it has a single programmed goal constrained within a narrow set of rules and parameters (such as a game).

To demonstrate what President Xi saw in AI winning a strategy game, and why the global balance of power hinges on it, we need to talk briefly about games.

Artificial Intelligence and Games

There are two types of strategy games: games of complete information and games of incomplete information. A game of complete information is one in which every player can see all of the parameters and options of every other player.

Tic-Tac-Toe is a game of complete information. An average adult can solve this game with less than thirty minutes of practice. That is, adopt a strategy that no matter what your opponent does, you can correctly counter it to obtain a draw. If your opponent deviates from that same strategy, you can exploit them and win.

Conversely, a basic game of uncertainty is Rock, Scissors, Paper. Upon learning the rules, all players immediately know the optimal strategy. If your opponent throws Rock, you want to throw Paper. If they throw Paper, you want to throw Scissors, and so on.

Unfortunately, you do not know ahead of time what your opponent is going to do. Being aware of this, what is the correct strategy?

The unexploitable strategy is to throw Rock 33 percent of the time, Scissors 33 percent of the time, and Paper 33 percent of the time, each option being chosen randomly to avoid observable patterns or bias.

This unexploitable strategy means that, no matter what approach your opponent adopts, they won't be able to gain an edge against you.

But lets imagine your opponent throws Rock 100 percent of the time. How does your randomized strategy stack up? 33 percent of the time you'll tie (Rock), 33 percent of the time you'll win (Paper), and 33 percent of the time you'll lose (Scissors)the total expected value of your strategy against theirs is 0.

Is this your optimal strategy? No. If your opponent is throwing Rock 100 percent of the time, you should be exploiting your opponent by throwing Paper.

Naturally, if your opponent is paying attention they, in turn, will adjust to start throwing Scissors. You and your opponent then go through a series of exploits and counter-exploits until you both gradually drift toward an unexploitable equilibrium.

With me so far? Good. Let's talk about computing and games.

As stated, nearly any human can solve Tic-Tac-Toe, and computers solved checkers many years ago. However more complex games such as Chess, Go, and No-limit Texas Holdem poker have not been solved.

Despite all being mind-bogglingly complex, of the three chess is simplest. In 1997, reigning world champion Garry Kasparov was soundly beaten by the supercomputer Deep Blue. Today, anyone reading this has access to a chess computer on their phone that could trounce any human player.

Meanwhile, the eastern game of Go eluded programmers. Go has many orders of magnitude more combinations than chess. Until recently, humans beat computers by being far more efficient in selecting moveswe don't spend our time trying to calculate every possible option twenty-five moves deep. Instead, we intuitively narrow our decisionmaking to a few good choices and assess those.

Moreover, unlike traditional computers, people are able to think in non-linear abstraction. Humans can, for example, imagine a future state during the late stages of the game beyond which a computer could possibly calculate. We are not constrained by a forward-looking linear progression. Humans can wonderfully imagine a future endpoint, and work backwards from there to formulate a plan.

Many previously believed that this combination of factorsnear-infinite combinations and the human ability to think abstractlymeant that go would forever remain beyond the reach of the computer.

Then in 2016 something unprecedented happened. The AI system, AlphaGo, defeated the reigning world champion go player Lee Sedol 4-1.

But that was nothing: two years later, a new AI system, AlphaZero, was pitched against AlphaGo.

Unlike its predecessor which contained significant databases of go theory, all AlphaZero knew was the rules, from which it played itself continuously over forty days.

After this period of self-learning, AlphaZero annihilated AlphaGo, not 4-1, but 100-0.

In forty days AlphaZero had superseded 2,500 years of total human accumulated knowledge and even invented a range of strategies that had never been discovered before in history.

Meanwhile, chess computers are now a whole new frontier of competition, with programmers pitting their systems against one another to win digital titles. At the time of writing the world's best chess engine is a program known as Stockfish, able to smash any human Grandmaster easily. In December 2017 Stockfish was pitted against AlphaZero.

Again, AlphaZero only knew the rules. AlphaZero taught itself to play chess over a period of nine hours. The result over 100 games? AlphaZero twenty-eight wins, zero losses, seventy-two draws.

Not only can artificial intelligence crush human players, it also obliterates the best computer programs that humans can design.

Artificial Intelligence and Abstraction

Most chess computers play a purely mathematical strategy in a game yet to be solved. They are raw calculators and look like it too. AlphaZero, at least in style, appears to play every bit like a human. It makes long-term positional plays as if it can visualize the board; spectacular piece sacrifices that no computer could ever possibly pull off, and exploitative exchanges that would make a computer, if it were able, cringe with complexity. In short, AlphaZero is a genuine intelligence. Not self-aware, and constrained by a sandboxed reality, but real.

Despite differences in complexity there is one limitation that chess and go both share they're games of complete information.

Enter No-limit Texas Holdem (hereon, Poker). This is the ultimate game of uncertainty and incomplete information. In poker, you know what your hole cards are, the stack sizes for each player, and the community cards that have so far come out on the board. However, you don't know your opponent's cards, whether they will bet or raise or how much, or what cards are coming out on later streets of betting.

Poker is arguably the most complex game in the world, combining mathematics, strategy, timing, psychology, and luck. Unlike Chess or Go, Pokers possibilities are truly infinite and across multiple players simultaneously. The idea that a computer could beat top Poker professionals seems risible.

Except that it has already happened. In 2017, the AI system Libratus comprehensively beat the best Head's-up (two-player) poker players in the world.

And now, just months ago, another AI system Pluribus achieved the unthinkableit crushed super high stakes poker games against multiple top professionals simultaneously, doing so at a win-rate of five big blinds per hour. For perspective, the difference in skill level between the best English Premier League soccer team and the worst would not be that much.

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Explained: The Artificial Intelligence Race is an Arms Race - The National Interest Online