Alfred's gay period

I re-watched Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train for the first time in decades over the weekend, and it was an interesting experience.  It's far from the director's best film - the climax is a little silly - but it is, of course, a great premise for a movie.

What I couldn't remember wondering about on first viewing was the degree to which the audience is meant to recognize the villain of the piece, Bruno - the stranger who proposes exchange murders, and then carries one out,  leaving tennis playing Guy in a bit of a pickle - is homosexual.  Certainly, on viewing it now, the hints seems everywhere - but is that just because I have read somewhere in the years since I saw it that this was indeed deliberate?      

Realising that it was based on a Patricia Highsmith novel, and knowing that gay elements appear in her other stories, I would have thought that the homosexual side would have been clear in that source material.   Yet according to Wikipedia, the movie screenplay made more of out of a homoerotic element that was only "hinted at" in the novel.  

Now that we have gay studies as part of academia, there's lots of "queer" movie analysis on the net about the movie, together with Rope, the other Hitchcock film with a clear homosexual subtext.   (With Rope, it's hardly in dispute, given it was a fictionalised version of the real life Leopold and Loeb murder - and they did have a sexual relationship.)  You can Google for "Queer studies Hitchcock" if you are inclined.

Anyway, what I didn't realise about all of this was that the actor who appeared in both films, Farley Granger (who played Guy in Strangers, the definitely heterosexual character) was clearly bisexual in real life.   His Wikipedia entry contains an awful lot of information about his sex and relationship life, much of it surprising, presumably sourced in many respects from a memoir he published in 2007.

He was, it would seem, someone who it would be difficult to categorise as other than genuinely bisexual, right from the start:

It was during his naval stint in Honolulu that Granger had his first sexual experiences, one with a hostess at a private club and the other with a Navy officer visiting the same venue, both on the same night.^[13] He was startled to discover he was attracted to both men and women equally, and in his memoir he observed, "I finally came to the conclusion that for me, everything I had done that night was as natural and as good as it felt ... I never have felt the need to belong to any exclusive, self-defining, or special group ... I was never ashamed, and I never felt the need to explain or apologize for my relationships to anyone .... I have loved men. I have loved women."^[14]

You can then read in the rest of the Wikipedia entry about the enormously lengthy list of flings and relationships he subsequently had with both men and women had throughout his long career of (mostly) pretty B grade movies and TV. 

Incidentally, Robert Walker, who played Bruno, seems to have been definitely heterosexual - or, at least, I would presume so seeing he had been twice divorced by age 30, and had children.  He suffered serious mental health issues, and died of a combination of alcohol and an injection his psychiatrist gave him (!) at the age of 32.  (He could easily pass for older in Strangers, I reckon.)

I haven't read whether Hitchcock knew of Granger's sexual inclinations before using him in two movies with a gay subtext.  (Apparently, Granger even slept with the gay screenwriter for Rope, but whether Hitchcock ever found out, I don't know.)  But it is a little odd how Hitchcock also liked using Cary Grant, who, despite a string of marriages, was widely rumoured to have been in at least one homosexual relationship when he was younger.  

Anyway, old Hollywood certainly carried its fair share of gossipy intrigue.  And the degree to which Hitchcock didn't mind using homosexual subtexts as a signal that the characters were prepared to do anything, within or outside the bounds of society's mores, is somewhat interesting.

The Trump non management style

Oooh - I do still sometimes find a link to something worthwhile in a Catallaxy thread. Sure, it's a bit like finding a diamond ring in the bottom of a septic tank, but this one is good:   an article from last week about Trump's lack of management skills, as told by several people who have worked for him in decades past.

And let's be honest here - the mere fact there are so many people close to Trump willing to talk to the press about how things are not going well in the White House (the Washington Post cites 17 in today's article, which Trump is bound to hate), there must be plenty of genuine concern about him from those in the know.

A "normal" Presidency does not face such sustained, critical, leaking so intensely at its start, and it is not credible that it is all coming from Obama aligned figures.  

As I was saying about the problem in the Catholic Church

Remember last week I was saying how the Catholic Church had tied itself in knots by trying to insist it had never been wrong before?   Well, here it is, plain as day, in the Catholic Herald:

Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia has said that it would be good for Pope Francis to answer the dubia, and that Francis cannot contradict Pope St John Paul II’s teaching on marriage.

In an interview with Crux to mark the publication of his new book, Archbishop Chaput was asked what he thought was at stake in the debate over marriage and Amoris Laetitia.

The document does not mention Communion for the remarried, but some bishops, including those of Malta and Germany, have claimed it authorises the practice.

John Paul II and Benedict XVI reaffirmed Church teaching that the remarried may not receive Communion, except possibly when they try to live “as brother and sister”.

Archbishop Chaput said that this teaching, and Jesus’s prohibition of adultery, could not be changed: “It seems to me that it’s impossible for us to contradict the words of Jesus, and it’s also impossible for a teaching to be true 20 years ago not to be true today when it’s the teachings of the pope.

Also, The Guardian ran a pretty good summary of the current controversy within Rome:

Civil war in the Vatican as conservatives battle Francis for the soul of Catholicism

He has no evidence

I see that JC, and others at Catallaxy, were convinced that Trump wouldn't be making claims of Obama's direct and personal involvement in "wiretapping Trump Tower" without evidence.

Time for them to wake up to understand how Trump is a con man who uses Right wing conspiracy theories to (what he thinks) is his advantage. He did it with birtherism; he is using Right wing conspiracy theory again.

There were reports that the Breitbart article was being circulated in the White House on the Friday.  There were reports that he was furious that Sessions did the (at least half) honourable thing in his recusing himself from investigations about Russian involvement. There were reports that his staffers (left back in Washington) were surprised at the Saturday morning tweet storm.   His press spokesman had no idea when any evidence would be offered.  (See my previous post.)

The response to questions that he produce evidence (as I predicted, there will be none provided) - punt it over to Congress and say that Trump will not speak of it again.  (Let's see if he can keep to that.)

The circumstances are overwhelming clear - Trump was inspired by a Right wing radio host, via Breitbart, to make exaggerated but serious claims against Obama personally as a diversionary tactic and with no evidence.  His staffers have been left struggling how to respond, and the best they have come up with "we'll say it's Congress's responsibility and therefore it would be inappropriate for us to keep speaking about it."

And his gullible base swallow it whole.

Look, if anyone thought that it was bad how the Bush administration and its agencies convinced voters (and other nations) to join in the Iraq invasion based on unreliable evidence, they should be horrified at how easy it will be for Trump to convince his base of any stupid over-reaction he wants to make against some international provocation.

And finally:  to be clear, I think it very likely the reports that there was a successful application to the court for a wiretap of some sort are correct.  If Trump wants us all to know the evidence that led to that successful issuing of a warrant - fine.  Lots of people would have liked to have known that - before the election.

Update:   This Hot Air post about it by Allahpundit (who is often accused in comments of being a rabid anti-Trumper, because he dares to question Trump) is pretty reasonable, and notes this:

Does Trump really want another high-profile Comey press conference, this time laying out precisely why the FBI was suspicious of, say, Paul Manafort’s communications with Russia? How do you suppose that would play politically for the White House?

 Update 2:  Fascinating, from the NYT.  (Both for content, and how everywhere is leaking in Washington!):

WASHINGTON — The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, asked the Justice Department this weekend to publicly reject President Trump’s assertion that President Barack Obama ordered the tapping of Mr. Trump’s phones, senior American officials said on Sunday. Mr. Comey has argued that the highly charged claim is false and must be corrected, they said, but the department has not released any such statement.

Mr. Comey, who made the request on Saturday after Mr. Trump leveled his allegation on Twitter, has been working to get the Justice Department to knock down the claim because it falsely insinuates that the F.B.I. broke the law, the officials said.

A spokesman for the F.B.I. declined to comment. Sarah Isgur Flores, the spokeswoman for the Justice Department, also declined to comment.

Mr. Comey’s request is a remarkable rebuke of a sitting president, putting the nation’s top law enforcement official in the position of questioning Mr. Trump’s truthfulness. The confrontation between the two is the most serious consequence of Mr. Trump’s weekend Twitter outburst, and it underscores the dangers of what the president and his aides have unleashed by accusing the former president of a conspiracy to undermine Mr. Trump’s young administration.

Continue reading the main story

A careless, dumb, gullible President with a gullible, dumb voter base not interested in facts

I'm waiting for some better analysis of the Trump "Obama tapped me, it's like Watergate" tweets before posting about it in too much detail.   But as far as I can tell so far, what's likely to have happened is this:

*  Trump read a Breitbart article by Pollack,  expanding on a Mark Levin call that Congress should investigate "the Obama administration" for "monitoring" Trump Tower.

*  Trump, apparently (or acting) unaware of previous reporting of leaks that FISC approval for a FISA warrant had been sought and granted in October,  tweets about it as if "the Obama administration" means Obama personally, and at least appears to accept, gullibly, everything in the Breitbart report as being true.  (Such as the line "No evidence is found — but the wiretaps continue, ostensibly for national security reasons..")

*  In fact, in previous leaks, it was said that the FBI sought and obtained the FISA warrant.  Other reports say "The Justice Department and the FBI".  In any event:

a.    The Justice Department is not "Obama";

b.    The fact that the FBI - whose Trump friendly announcement of the nothing burger of a further investigation of Clinton emails should surely be compelling evidence of it not being in the pocket of the Obama administration - was asking for it shows that an independent investigative body thought there was serious evidence making it worth getting the warrant.

*  Nonetheless, Trump, either deliberately, or through his dumb, carefree attitude to facts and a willingness to say anything to shore up his base, claims it was all about Obama, personally, wiretapping "his phones".

*  His dumb, gullible, couldn't care about facts, base, swallows this whole, and are about to go on Sunday rallies to support their dangerous cult leader.

Here's why this is dangerous:

This may well blow over as a case of Trump carelessness and his easy manipulation into making claims by the Right wing media.   (Whether it is also a case of him deliberately manipulating his base - who knows?)   He will be challenged to produce the evidence that Obama was personally involved (and that he managed to sway the FBI to join in) and it will not be there.    He and his Right wing conspiracy mongers - they've been doing this for over 20 years - will just go down muttering that they still think he did it.

But the thing is - when he faces a real life crisis in his administration, say, a serious terror attack, who can possibly trust that he will not take the same careless, fact free lines in his response, and encourage the same to his stupid base, and that this will cause real trouble?

 Update:

Comment by nutty Australian Trump conspiracist noted:

 Update 2:   The American Right has brainwashed itself into believing and promoting conspiracy for nearly a couple of decades now - who can forget that as late as 2015, 43% of Republicans still believed Obama was a secret Muslim;  in 2010-2011, polling showed between 31 to 45% believed he had been born outside of America;   in 2016, Gallop showed Republicans hitting a new high in believing that climate change is happening and is caused by humans - but it's still only around 40% holding that view compared to 85% of Democrats.  (Furthermore, only 20% of Republicans think it will be a problem in their lifetime.)  And let's not bother looking at all the cynical use of Benghazi claims and conspiracy by Republicans, that went no where but are doubtless still believed by their base in large numbers.

It is unhealthy for any society or group of people to be so prone to believing nonsense conspiracies - I've complained before about the unusual degree to which it seems the residents of many Muslim countries will accept conspiracy.

So it is with America (and Australia, for that matter) too - but Trump is exactly the wrong person to lead the country out of the corrosive effect of conspiracy belief, with his attitude that he can say anything, regardless of facts.

Update 3:   Here's the succinct version of my post, from The New Yorker News Desk:

It would seem that Trump, in the same spirit of diversion, has conflated the work of the courts, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies with “Obama.”

That article also gives a good summary of a favourite Trump tactic:

One of President Trump’s most consistent rhetorical maneuvers is a fairly basic but often highly effective one—the diversionary reverse accusation. When he is accused of benefitting from “fake news,” he flips the neologism on its head; suddenly CNN, the Times, and the rest are “fake news.” When Democratic politicians such as Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi call for investigations of his campaign’s contacts with Russian officials, Trump posts pictures of those critics meeting publicly with Vladimir Putin and calls for an investigation. This happened on Saturday. He fogs the language and clouds the issue.

(Those of my readers who are familiar with CL, who has long commented at Catallaxy, will recognize this as his constant tactic over the years, too.   It's always hard to tell, when people use such an obvious tactic repeatedly, whether they have managed to convince themselves that it's really a convincing response, rather than just a transparent debating trick to show "winning".)

Update 4:    Gary Kasparov sounds very accurate in this series of tweets (read from the bottom up):

And for Jason Soon:  I just noticed this in Kasparov's Wiki entry:

Kasparov collaborated with Max Levchin and Peter Thiel on The Blueprint, a book calling for a revival of world innovation, planned to release in March 2013 from W. W. Norton & Company. The book was never released, as the authors disagreed on its contents.

Update 5:    you could almost feel sympathy for the Trump clean up team; except for the fact that if they had any moral and decent judgement, they would never have taken their jobs in the first place:

Certainly took their time...

‘False prophet’: Duterte, the Catholic Church and the fight for the soul of the Philippines

Making cannabis safer

Nearly a year ago, I made the observation here (see the comments to this post) that it seems odd that, if countries are going to legalise cannabis use, they don't also regulate it to make it safer.   I mean, they do it with alcohol (at least within venues where it is served - and I see some places ban the sale of nearly pure ethanol as an alcoholic beverage); why should another legal drug avoid nearly all regulation as to its content?

It's been well recognized for years that THC content has been increasing, for example:  why not legalise strains with a set upper limit?   Also, it seems reasonably well established CBD can be protective of the brain - why not regulate that the sold product has to have a certain balance between it and THC?

Anyway, my very reasonable suggestion has been endorsed by some researchers in the UK.

They do note that not much is known about what a protective does of CBD might be, and the problem might be (I would guess) how many years of research it may take to be more certain about it.

But I thought its protective effects were established enough to at least know you would be doing no harm to take a stab at mandating a certain content for it.

I expect John will be along to comment on this!

Meet the Russians

I have to say, the "Trump campaign and the Russians" keeps looking  worse for Trump.  You know it's bothering him, too, when he issues a series of tweets that's its all a witch hunt, and the leaks are the real story.   (That's silly - if there is no story, there's no reason for anyone to leak.)

I have never written off the possibility of this hurting Trump in a major way, but it is seeming more and more likely that it will.

And man, aren't Trumpkin/wingnuts struggling with their false equivalence stories about Democrats and meetings with Russians?    But they'll convince themselves of anything - they're so ridiculously partisan they'd convince themselves the Moon is made of cheese if it would help their culture warrior dumbo-in-chief.

Obsessions of conservatives and libertarians

I don't have much doubt that the QUT s18C Racial discrimination case was poorly handled all around, and I have sympathy for the students involved.    So some legislative corrections to how these cases are handled procedurally are at least warranted.

I also get the impression (without looking into it in too much detail) that Gillian Triggs has made mistakes in her defence of the handling of the matter.  But at the same time, her treatment by conservatives in the Coalition, and the intense journalistic and editorial support for them in The Australian, has amounted to a nutty jihad that has lasted years now.   Despite her errors, I think the overwhelming impression the public is left with is that conservatives (and the odd libertarian) in the government, and a newspaper, are absolutely obsessed with her, and seem to think there is still nothing better to do than hound the head of a commission because of perceived slights to them and their journalist pal Andrew Bolt.

I can't really recall anything like this in Australian politics - and the sooner the nutty conservatives in the Coalition split from their parties, the better it would be. 

Gene networks and evolution

An article at BBC - Earth explains the idea.

Not as intriguing an idea as morphic resonance - but more likely to be true...

Nice photos

The Atlantic put up some photos from The Smithsonian 2016 photo contest, and they're all great.

The first one, showing a rugged part of the Isle of Skye, really caught my eye for its alien landscape looks:

So that's what "acting Presidential" is meant to sound like?

Trump raises all sort of questions about just how dumb and credulous voters and pundits can be, but fortunately there is enough liberal pushback against some of the ridiculously over-enthusiastic reception given to Trump's teleprompted* speech to re-assure us the nation isn't completely nuts.

David Frum has a very well argued, moderate take in The Atlantic, and I liked this line in particular:

The purpose of these joint-session speeches is not, actually, to reassure the president’s base that the leader of the country is mentally well.

But he doesn't deal with the most outrageous inconsistency (and most queasily quasi fascist element) of the speech:   Trump's starting with a (belated) condemnation of a hate crime against foreigners for daring to be in America (the Kansas shooting), and then spending much of the speech again telling Americans that the nation is under siege from dangerous foreigners who'll kill you or sell your kids drugs if given half the chance.

The idea of creating an agency specifically for highlighting crimes committed by (undocumented?) immigrants has not, as far as I can see, been condemned as widely as it should.  Here's the Washington Post:

… I have ordered the Department of Homeland Security to create an office to serve American Victims. The office is called VOICE — Victims Of Immigration Crime Engagement. We are providing a voice to those who have been ignored by our media, and silenced by special interests.

This proposal, introduced in a memo from Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, has received a lot of negative feedback. (When Trump mentioned it, Democrats groaned.) One issue is that there are negative historical echoes to isolating criminal behavior by one group of people. As the Atlantic notes, the Ministry of Justice in 1930s Germany collected and publicized reports of Jewish criminal activity.

I reckon all the immigrant and "terrorism within our borders" talk has the grubby fingerprints of Bannon all over it.   And ss EJ Dionne Jnr writes in the Washington Post,  in his piece entitled "Trump Still Wants You to be Very, Very Afraid":

And his call to create an office in the Department of Homeland Security called VOICE (“Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement”) was a demagogic propaganda effort to suggest that immigrants are especially prone to committing acts of violence when, in fact, they are not.

No Trump speech is complete without a reference to Chicago’s murder rate, which he mentions constantly because the national crime statistics don’t bear out his implication that the nation is more unsafe than ever.

And Trump wants Americans to be very, very afraid of the threat of terrorism by way of rationalizing his unjustifiable policies barring refugees from a selected group of majority-Muslim countries. “We cannot allow a beachhead of terrorism to form inside of America,” he declared. For good measure, he added: “We cannot allow our nation to become a sanctuary for extremists.” I bet his speechwriters were proud of those scary phrases, “a beachhead of terrorism” and “a sanctuary for extremists.” That’s the way to get people really alarmed.

Update:  Krugman is scathing of the pundit response, as usual:

The big news from last night’s speech is that our pundits is not learning. After all the debacles of 2016, they swooned over the fact that Trump — while still lying time after time and proposing truly vile initiatives — was able to read from a teleprompter without breaking into an insane rant. If American democracy falls, supposed political analysts who are actually just bad theater critics will share part of the blame.

The subsequent point he explains, about how coal jobs left decades ago, and are simply not going to come back, is well made.

Update 2:  William Saletan, at Slate, once again makes the comparison between George W Bush and Trump, and the contrast between the first speeches both gave to Congress is incredibly stark:

“America has never been united by blood or birth or soil,” Bush declared in his 2001 inaugural address. “We are bound by ideals that move us beyond our backgrounds, lift us above our interests and teach us what it means to be citizens. Every child must be taught these principles. Every citizen must uphold them. And every immigrant, by embracing these ideals, makes our country more, not less, American.” In his first speech to Congress—delivered almost exactly 16 years ago on Feb. 27, 2001—Bush told Americans: “We all came here for a reason. … Juntos podemos. Together, we can.” He called on Congress to make America not just wealthy, but “generous and just.”

As president, Bush failed to fulfill those aspirations. But Trump doesn’t even acknowledge them: In his remarks Tuesday night, Trump spoke not of generosity, justice, or ideals but of blood, birth, background, and soil. “We are one people, with one destiny,” he proclaimed. “We all bleed the same blood. We all salute the same great American flag.” A fascist leader could have uttered the same words. In place of Bush’s plea to welcome immigrants, Trump said refugees should “return home.”

*  Apparently, Presidents using teleprompts is OK now in Wingnut land.

 

Ho hum

I'm a bit busy, and the news feels strangely boring today. 

Well, at least you can read more about the tensions within the Catholic Church here.  While the author is on the conservative side, the picture he paints seems relatively accurate.

The Mormons deal with this sort of issue, if I understand them correctly, just by having its leader declare that God's passed on the message to him that the Church has been wrong for the last 100 years.   Easy peasy.  The Catholic Church instead has tied itself into knots about how it has never been truly wrong, making change that much harder.

That's my simplified version of the current problem!

A radiation spike

Well, I didn't know planes were sent to sniff out radiation spikes to see if they can tell where they're from.  Currently one may be sniffing around Europe.

Interesting post at Atlas Obscura...

Yet another "bad father" story

Just when you think you might have heard every gobsmacking story about what a terrible father Evelyn Waugh could be, out comes another book with another one:

In 1958, while on military training in Cyprus, Auberon Waugh accidentally shot himself in the chest with a machine gun. He was nineteen. Over the next ten days he fought for his life, having lost a lung, two ribs, part of his hand and his spleen. His mother Laura flew out immediately to be by his side. His father, Evelyn, preferred to remain at home. “I shall go out to travel home with Laura if he dies”, Waugh wrote detachedly to his friend Lady Diana Cooper. In the event, this was unnecessary; Auberon was brought back to England and installed at the Queen Alexandra Military hospital. Even so, it was a further week before Waugh managed to go and visit his son. By this point, Auberon had developed a chest infection due to a back abscess and again feared that death was near. “Dear Papa”, wrote Auberon on what he thought would be his deathbed. “Just a line to tell you what for some reason I was never able to show you in my lifetime, that I admire, revere and love you more than any man in the world.” The next month, with Auberon still too ill to be operated on, Waugh stopped his allowance of £25 a month. Auberon wept “bitter tears of rage”.

A few minor Oscar observations

*  Jimmy Kimmel was likeable enough as a host.  I'm not sure why they let TV hosts put their same segments from their TV show on the Oscars, though.

*  Meryl Streep seems to have plateaued in the ageing process.  I think she has looked the same for the last 15 years.  Nicole Kidman, on the other hand, seems to be going backwards in age.  Much "work" involved, I suspect.

*  Shirley McLaine, to her credit, seems to spend little or no money on face work;  she's 82 and still pretty funny, if somewhat loopy.

*  Steven Spielberg not spotted in the audience, for once.  :(

 

Corporate tax cuts aren't magic

Found via Axios, Stephen Roach with an argument against the Trumpian take on corporations and tax:

Corporate tax cuts are coming in the United States. While this push pre-dates last November’s presidential election, President Donald Trump’s Make-America-Great-Again mantra has sealed the deal. Beleaguered US businesses, goes the argument, are being squeezed by confiscatory taxes and onerous regulations – strangling corporate earnings and putting unrelenting pressure on capital spending, job creation, and productivity, while sapping America’s competitive vitality. Apparently, the time has come to give businesses a break.

But this argument raises an obvious question: If the problem is so simple, why hasn’t this fix already been tried? The answer is surprising. 

For starters, it is a real stretch to bemoan the state of corporate earnings in the US. Commerce Department statistics show that after-tax corporate profits (technically, after-tax profits from current production, adjusted for inventory and depreciation-accounting distortions) stood at a solid 9.7% of national income in the third quarter of 2016.

While that is down from the 11% peak hit in 2012 – owing to tepid economic growth, which typically puts pressure on profit margins – it hardly attests to a chronic earnings problem. Far from anemic, the current GDP share of after-tax profits is well above the post-1980 average of 7.6%.

Trends in corporate taxes, which stood at just 3.5% of national income in the third quarter of 2016, support a similar verdict. Yes, the figure is higher than the post-2000 level of 3% (which represents the lowest 15-year average tax burden for corporate America since the 2.9% reading in the mid-1990s); but it is well below the 5.2% average share recorded during the boom years of the post-World War II era, from 1950 to 1969. In other words, while there may be reason to criticize the structure and complexities of the US corporate tax burden, there is little to suggest that overall corporate taxes are excessive. 

Conversely, the share of national income going to labor has been declining. In the third quarter of 2016, worker compensation – wages, salaries, fringe benefits, and other so-called supplements such as social security, pension contributions, and medical benefits – stood at 62.6% of national income. While that represents a bit of a rebound from the 61.2% low recorded in the 2012-2014 period, it is two percentage points below the post-1980 average of 64.6%. In other words, the pendulum of economic returns has swung decisively away from labor toward owners of capital – not exactly a compelling argument in favor of relief for purportedly hard-pressed American businesses.

Update:  and on the Australian scene, Greg Jericho sums up the Grattan Institute's report that lowering the corporate tax rate is going to hurt the budget bottom line significantly, with any expected benefits taking too long to arrive to avoid that.  

Sounds quite plausible to me.  

More than neurons

Ed Yong has stopped writing his blog, but here he is at The Atlantic, with a good article about some neuroscientists getting sick of the approach of other neuroscientists.  A sample:

John Krakaeur, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins Hospital, has been asked to BRAIN Initiative meetings before, and describes it like “Maleficent being invited to Sleeping Beauty’s birthday.” That’s because he and four like-minded friends have become increasingly disenchanted by their colleagues’ obsession with their toys. And in a new paper that’s part philosophical treatise and part shot across the bow, they argue that this technological fetish is leading the field astray. “People think technology + big data + machine learning = science,” says Krakauer. “And it’s not.”

He and his fellow curmudgeons argue that brains are special because of the behavior they create—everything from a predator’s pounce to a baby’s cry. But the study of such behavior is being de-prioritized, or studied “almost as an afterthought.” Instead, neuroscientists have been focusing on using their new tools to study individual neurons, or networks of neurons. According to Krakauer, the unspoken assumption is that if we collect enough data about the parts, the workings of the whole will become clear. If we fully understand the molecules that dance across a synapse, or the electrical pulses that zoom along a neuron, or the web of connections formed by many neurons, we will eventually solve the mysteries of learning, memory, emotion, and more. “The fallacy is that more of the same kind of work in the infinitely postponed future will transform into knowing why that mother’s crying or why I’m feeling this way,” says Krakauer. And, as he and his colleagues argue, it will not.That’s because behavior is an emergent property—it arises from large groups of neurons working together, and isn’t apparent from studying any single one.

Oscars for movies barely seen

Given the odd backlash against La La Land, and the hosting by Jimmy Kimmel, I was curious to watch the Oscars this year.  (I think we have last year's show recorded on a hard drive, but I haven't watched it.)

Now that I know the results in the "sorry about that mistake, La La fans" climax, I have to make the observation, as many others no doubt will too, that the Best Picture Oscar for years now seems to go to critical favourites which have next to no appeal to a wide audience.

Moonlight might be fine film, but how much appeal can an episodic  film about an American black man coming to terms with being gay and living in crime affected Miami hold for a wider audience?  I see that the movie has made $22 million in the US - that's good for an arthouse flick, but it's not a lot of tickets.

Seems to me that the last, broadly popular, movie that won Best Picture was The King's Speech in 2010.  (In 2012, Argo did a respectable enough $136 million in the US, but only made $96 million overseas.  King's Speech made $414 million globally.)

Shockingly, I see that the 2009 winner, The Hurt Locker, made only $17 million in the US.  That's tiny.  Even The Artiste from 2011, which I would have guessed was the biggest Best Picture Box Office bomb, made $45 million in the US and $133 million globally. 

Getting an Oscar might be nice, but producers must surely prefer the cash of an actually popular movie...

Depressing stories for a Monday

*  Bill Paxton's unexpected death:  seems that his likeability on screen was matched in his personal life. 

*  Slate has a lengthy article on horrendous, ethics free, medical experiments by US doctors in Guartemala post World War 2. 

*   Did you notice the story from a couple of weeks back that ocean oxygen levels are dropping, due to warming oceans?  No, well, it's all in accordance with predictions, apparently, and is another reason that techno optimists who think everything will be OK if we just make everyone rich enough to get enough airconditioning are wrong.