Review of A Rule Against Murder

A Rule Against Murder by Louise Penny
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Another great addition to Louise Penny's Inspector Gamache Series. Unlike most of the books in the series, this one is not set in the village of Three Pines itself (the villagers are spared a murder!, albeit temporarily), but rather at a nearby luxury hotel hidden in the woods. Inspector Gamache and his wife are celebrating their anniversary at the hotel, while the rest of the rooms are taken by Mrs. Finney and her extended family.

 It becomes clear that while her newly married name is Finney, her children from a previous marriage are all Morrows, including Gamache's friend artist Peter Morrow from nearby Three Pines, who is the last of the four children to arrive. His wife Clara, who is essentially the co-protagonist of the series, arrives with him, where they meet the others: oldest brother Thomas and his wife Sandra, older sister Julia, and younger sister Marianna. There's also a grandchild of undetermined gender named Bean, as well as Mrs. Finney's new husband Bert, who was himself a lifelong friend of Mrs. Finney's late husband, Charles Morrow. Several staff of the hotel are prominent, and a couple of the Three Pines regulars make brief appearances, but this story is primarily about the Morrows.

As a study of a dysfunctional, bitter family, A Rule Against Murder is brilliant. It is heart-rending to see all the siblings tear into each other while the matriarch dispenses little love combined with plenty of judgment. Inevitably one of the family is murdered, at which point Gamache takes over.

The murder mystery itself is neither terribly elaborate nor compelling. The method of killing the victim seems rather improbable, a fact that seems to increasingly be a feature of the Gamache series. But the reason to read this series if not for any Agatha Christie-style twists, but rather for the psychological insights of the author, that are primarily viewed and revealed through the eyes of Chief Inspector Armand Gamache.


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History of "Centrism" in the Democratic Party

The main thesis of this post is going to be that the "centrists"* of the Democratic party are killing it with a combination of incompetence and an outdated model of voter behavior.  The incompetence relates to the usage of bad voting models.  Clearly, if the Party's intent is to use modeling to win elections, they are doing a horrible job.

*Yes, I use scare quotes around the word "centrists".  I don't think they actually represent the center of American political thought.  Economically they are pretty consistently right-of-center.  But our dumbed-down national media refuses to ever use the word "conservative" to describe a Democrat, so by default they are assigned the label "centrist".

Right now, the Republican Party controls

• the Presidency
• the Senate, with a 52-48 majority
• the House of Representatives, with a 241-194 majority
• Governorships is 33 of 50 states
• control of both houses of the state legislature in 32 of 50 states (Dems have only 13)

The Democratic literally hasn't been this politically weak since the days of Herbert Hoover.  

By way of contrast, consider the situation in 1976:

• Democrats won the White House behind Jimmy Carter
• a filibuster-proof majority of 61-38 in the Senate
• a massive 292-143 majority in the House of Representatives
• 37 Governorships to 12 for Republicans
• a huge advantage in the number of state legislatures controlled 

Yes, by picking the mid-70s as my initial point of comparison I've chosen a peak of anti-Nixon sentiment.  But 1976 wasn't a wave election for Democrats.  From the 1954 election through the Reagan wave in 1980, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, and while the Senate flipped a couple times in the 1980s, Democrats controlled the House until 1994.

So what happened?  Well the simplest explanation is that the Republican Party flipped the South. The Democratic Party was the party of the Confederacy, but as they also became the party of Civil Rights legislation in the 1960, they gradually lost favor in the South.  Southern Democrats became "boll weevils" and "Reagan Democrats" and then eventually just became Republicans.  

Starting in 1982, in response to the "Reagan Revolution" Democrats began to shift away from the more liberal stances of the 1960s and 1970s.  People like Gary Hart, Paul Tsongas, and Bill Bradley argued that the Party had become too anti-business for its own good, and started a movement to pursue business-friendly "centrism" as an alternative.  One name for this thinking is "neo-liberalism" which dates back to the 1930s.  As an example of this thinking, see A Neo-Liberal's Manifesto by Charles Peters.

Said Mr. Peters:

"If neo-conservatives are liberals who took a critical look at liberalism and decided to become conservatives, we are liberals who took the same look and decided to retain our goals but to abandon some of our prejudices. We still believe in liberty and justice and a fair chance for all, in mercy for the afflicted and help for the down and out. But we no longer automatically favor unions and big government or oppose the military and big business. Indeed, in our search for solutions that work, we have come to distrust all automatic responses, liberal or conservative."

Gradually through the 1980s the neo-liberals took over the levers of party power.  In 1984 Walter Mondale won the Democratic nomination for the Presidency and got crushed at a national level by a very popular Ronald Reagan.  Mondale was the last true liberal to get the nomination.  Mike Dukakis in 1988 was a "technocrat" and since then the Democrats have stuck to "centrists": Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton.  (Note that not all of these people are equally "centrist".  Indeed, since his defeat in 2000 Al Gore changed his focus to environmental issues and became reliably leftist.  In 2008 Obama ran as a candidate to the left of Hillary Clinton and won the election easily, but his term as President could not accurately be defined as "liberal".

...
I've been sitting on this for a month.  Will post now and do follow-up when convenient.  Really aiming for a consideration of the "bell curve" model of the voting public.

Yes, there is something deeply wrong with the Republican party and we have to stop pretending this is normal

First in a two-part series, with the follow-up to be called "Yes, there is something deeply wrong with the Democratic party."

No, they're not the same thing.

The Republican party has become an entity run by sociopaths and anti-intellectuals.  They feed upon the cultural backlash of the very religious against the non-religious well-educated "coastal elite".  But of course, our networks can never discuss religion, so this entire aspect of our culture is simply ignored.

All the crap about "the Religious Right" was exposed as a sham this year, as the rallied behind the least religious Presidential candidate in the nation's history.

How did we reach a point where a failed casino owner, a racist deadbeat landlord, an internet scammer is supposed to be treated with "the deference due to the office"?  He's a horrible human being.  His appeal is anti-intellectualism, and let's be clear about that.  This is the culture war, front and center.

Wins Above Replacement - Is it taken too seriously?

For some sportswriters, the statistic known as Wins Above Replacement, or WAR for short, is viewed as the end-all, be-all of evaluating baseball players.  The basic idea is this: using the information from a large number of different hitting statistics (or including fielding statistics in the full version), determine the "number of wins" that a player contributes to a team, compared to an average player, over the course of a 162-game season. For a fuller explanation, see, for example, this description at FanGraphs.

The high-level formula is this:

WAR = (Batting Runs + Base Running Runs +Fielding Runs + Positional Adjustment + League Adjustment +Replacement Runs) / (Runs Per Win)

This statistic is very favorable to players like Mike Trout.  Now Trout is an excellent player - let there be no doubt about that.  He's one of the best hitters in the league, is an excellent fielder, and a strong baserunner who can steal bases.  I just wonder if everything is calibrated properly.

Here's a snapshot from ESPN.com, showing the top 10 hitters in the American League, sorted by batting average.  (Aside: batting average has largely been replaced by on-base percentage in the thinking of modern sabremetricians, but it still is used as a default stat for sorting.)

What interests me here is the disparity in WAR between Trout, Betts, and Altuve versus other hitters who seem to also be having good seasons, like Pedroia and Ortiz.  I should make it clear that the WAR listed above is the total over hitting, baserunning, and fielding.   But curiously, very little of Trout's WAR is from fielding.  His OWAR ius 9.36, compared to Betts' 5.96 and Ortiz's 4.89.  Betts gets a lot of WAR from his fielding - 3.1-3.2, depending on what the round-off error is.  Trout has .6-.5, while Ortiz might get as little as .06 defensive WAR - an unsurprising fact since he only plays defense on the rare occasion that the Red Sox are playing on the road in a National League park  (and even then he takes some games off.) 

I simply don't believe that, as an offensive player, Mike Trout is worth twice as much in terms of WAR as David Ortiz.  Trout has a slightly higher OBP, but a lower slugging percentage.  He has 39 more runs scored, but 27 fewer RBIs, and is much lower in most power categories - fewer doubles and home runs.  Many more walks, but also many more strikeouts.  Trout has the advantage with stolen bases, but still, that's only 26 SBs - one per roughly every six games.  I view stolen bases as analogous to walks - just extra bases to be added to the total base sum.  

So - where does the huge number come from?  I don't know.  There are many explantions like the one above that indicate what WAR is supposed to mean, but I cannot find a closed formula for it that letss me plug in numbers.  I  have found a "Simple WAR calculator" at wahoosonfirst.com, but it doesn't produce the numbers I see above.  

The Dreadful primary season

This is really shaping up to be the worst election year in memory.  The Republicans are falling apart as a political organization.  They've been cultivating anti-government sentiment for so long they now are controlled by a majority that both thinks that they have some divine right to rule the country and that they should try to do their best to keep the government from doing anything.  Well, that's a bit oversimplistic, but the point remains that they've adopted a scorched Earth attitude towards the debt ceiling, towards foreign relations, towards keeping the government open, and, most recently, towards the process of keeping SCOTUS nominations going forward.

Last-minute Review of 2015 in Movies

I've actually seen six of the eight Oscar nominees for Best Picture this year, having missed Brooklyn and Room.  The Revenant is the favorite, according to whatever logic works is ruling the day in Hollywood.  IMO, both The Big Short and Spotlight are clearly better, as are The Martian and even Mad Max: Fury Road, a surprising entry into the category.  Other good films have been neglected, because apparently they are not in genres (comedy, horror) that can be considered.

So I've decided to review my movie-watching of the year, sorted according to various categories.

We'll start with Spy Movies, of which there were many:

Spy Movies

Kingsman:the Secret Service - a very enjoyable romp starring Colin Firth as a member of a British Spy Service fighting international terror in the form of Samuel L. Jackon's lisping villain.  Really good action sequences and a clever plot.  The Freebird/church fight is incredibly gruesome/hilarious.

Spy - Melissa McCarthy plays the lead in this spy comedy. Funny movie with decent plot to it - one of her better works.  Plot is actually pretty pretty well constructed.  

Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation - hey, Tom Cruise has done another Mission Impossible movie!  The basic plot hasn't changed over the course of the series.  But the action sequences here are pretty good.  

The Man from U.N.C.L.E.  - a spy movie set in the 1960s based on the concept of the old Robert Vaughn TV show.  Stars Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer as the American and the Russian, along with Alicia Vikander as a German woman who works with them.  Love the period fashion of 1960s Italy.  Probably the best plot of this bunch.

SPECTRE - the latest Daniel Craig 007 movie.  Acting is really good, but the plot is pretty much non-existent.  It's all about how Christoph Waltz is the new Blofeld, the man behind all of Bond's torments.  I guess the idea is that he just shows up and is the Bad Guy, because, you know, he's Blofeld.  And Christoph Waltz.  A bit of a disappointment.

What gets me most about this category is that the two established franchises pretty much mailed in their screenplays.

Superhero Movies

Avengers: Age of Ultron - a good movie, but a big overstacked with characters by now.  Didn't have the impact of the first Avengers movie.  

AntMan - pretty generic origin story.  Well done but these are formulaic by now.  

Deadpool is better than either.

Space Opera

I don't like the practice of calling movies like Star Wars and Guardians of the Galaxy "Sci-Fi" even when there's no science in them at all.  They are more properly understood as Space Opera - extended adventure stories that just happen to be set in space.  I'd say we had two this year:

Jupiter Ascending - I enjoyed this movie, though a lot of that is due to Mila Kunis.  Eddie Redmayne plays one of her homicidal family members and is great.  Sean Bean plays a solider who, bizarrely, doesn't die.  Chaning Tatum plays the love interest who has no chemistry with Mila.  Movie kind of bombed.

Star Wars: the Force Awakens - much better than the prequels.  Bringing back Lawrence Kasdan to write the screenplay instead of letting George Lucas do so was a great idea.  Harrison Ford is great.  The newcomes (Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Adam Driver, and Oscar Isaac) are great.  People have complained that the plot was a mirror image of Episode 4, but that's only true if you only watched the last fifteen minutes, and even then it's not true.  Yes, it has common themes and plot devices.  Duh.

True Stories

Spotlight - the story of the investigative reporting of the Boston Globe's Spotlight division on the pederasty scandal of the Catholic Chuch.  A well-crafted and well-written movie.  Acting is very good, esp. Mark Ruffalo.  

The Big Short - a compelling recounting of how a small number of investors decided the real estate market was bubbling in 2007-2008 and decided to sell them short.  Really devastating critique of the industry.  And nothing has changed on Wall Street.  So we've got that to enjoy.

Bridge of Spies - enjoyable period piece with Tom Hanks as the man negotiating the release of captured U2 pilot Francis Gary Powers.  Kind of the movie we expect these days from Spielberg and Hanks - enjoyable, doesn't really take any risks.  Mark Rylance is deservedly getting a lot of praise for his portrayal of the Russian spy Rudoph Abel who was traded.  Writing is good, as well as the acting, but as I said, the movie doesn't really take any risks.

Black Mass - Johnny Depp plays Whitey Bolger in this story about how he manipulated his police handlers to help him eliminate his competition in the organized crime business of 1970s Boston.

Between Black Mass and Spotlight I wonder how I ever got through Boston of the 1970s neither molested nor murdered. 

Everest - an IMAX feature (well, it was available on other screens, but really, what's the point?) about the tragic disaster in 1996 when a couple tourist groups got stuck in a storm on Mount Everest.  A gripping and sad story.  

Very strong year for this category.  I would not want to be required to pick between Spotlight and The Big Short.  Either would be a worthy Best Picture winner.

Sci-Fi

The Martian - I hope I don't have to explain why this is science fiction and Jupiter Ascending isn't.  The science of The Martian is exceptionally good, at least in how it treats the problems of how to survive on a foreign planet with no atmosphere and not enough food when the nearest transport is speeding off in the wrong direction.  Not only the best sci-fi of the year, but one of the best sci-fi pictures of many years.

Ex Machina - also a really, really good movie.  I only saw this on video because the marketing did not really capture how good this movie is.  It's another "genesis of a soul in AI" story.  Oscar Isaac is brilliant, again, this time as the high tech software genius, as is Alicia Vikander as the budding AI/robot.  BTW, Vikander is the breakout star of the year, and I only saw two of her three movies, when the third (The Danish Girl) is the one she just won an Oscar for.

Everdeen/Everdenes 

Mockingjay: Part two.  Not really anybody's fault here, but Mockingjay just isn't enough of a story to make a great movie, esp. not when compared to The Hunger Games and Catching Fire.  The story is realistic, but it's just too anti-climactic.  But of course J-Law rocks.  I mean, duh.

Far from the Madding Crowd - Carey Mulligan makes a credible Bathsheba Everdeen in the first major movie version of this story since Julie Christie played the role in a classic performance.  The '60s version had a more bombastic cast compared to last year's understated version.  I think I prefer the newer version.  

Period Stories

The Revenant - this is supposedly based on a "true story" but I think the key there is "story" as my research of the tale of Hugh Glass is that it's a great fronteir story but it's authenticity has been called into doubt.  Those fronteirsmen were known to exaggerate a bit.  Certainly the real Hugh Glass could not have survived everything that happened to him in the movie.  Anyway, the acting here is great, though I find the themes a bit heavy-handed and the plotting a bit silly at points.  Worth watching for the landscapes.

The Hateful Eight - Tarantino's latest film.  And as was said, you can only compare Hitori Hanso swords to other Hitori Hanso swords, and you can really only compare Tarantino films to his other films.  The Hateful Eight is very enjoyable in a closed-room mystery kind of way.  The scope isn't as large as his prior two movies (Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchanged) but it's still a good movie worth seeing.  

Serena - a story about an industrialist woman played by J-Law.  One of her weaker films, though of course not her fault.  She needs to stop doing movies with Bradley Cooper.  I'm going to have to talk to her about this.

Mr. Holmes - Ian McKellan plays a 90-something retired Sherlock Holmes in this enjoyable mini-myestery.  A good story.

Animated Movies

Shaun the Sheep - an animated feature from Aardman studio that gave us Wallace and Gromit as well as Chicken Run.  Really great animated film  as we've come to expect from Aardman.  No dialogue! But the story doesn't suffer from the absence.

Inside Out - Pixar's offering this year, about how each of us is controlled by a quartet of personified emotions inside a bridge-like control room in our brains.  Pixar keeps putting out great movies, and this is as good as we've come to expect.  A movie about growing up and how we have to leave childish things behind.  And how we need not only joy, anger, and disgust, but how even sadness plays an important role.  

Minions - not much to say here, except that it was a great idea to give the Minions of Despicable Me their own movie.  

Saw three animated movies last year and they were all great.

Dystopian

Mad Max: Fury Road - really much better than I had hoped it would be.  Definitely the action movie of the year and it was great to watch on a big screen.  Tom  Hardy got top billing as Max but Charlize Theron really stole the movie as Furiosa.  BTW, it's winning a lot of secondary awards so far tonight.

Horror

It Follows - a low budget movie based on a very simple idea.  The risks of teenage sex include not only disease and emotional turmoil, but real existential danger in a monster that tracks down whoever the latest person on its victim list is.  Apparently its target list works like a computer science "stack" - when the person at the top of the stack has sex with a new person, the new person moves to the front of the line for the stalking monster's target list.  And if that person is killed, the stack moves up.  Great horror movies often have this kind of simple plot device - I was reminded of The Ring and The Grudge here.  When it comes to making horror movies, often having a small budget is a benefit.  With a cast of unknowns, the movie isn't constrained by star-centered plot expectations (you cannot kill off Janet Leigh less than halfway through the movie!  OK, bad example.  Certainly you're not going to kill off Drew Barrymore before the opening credits!  Another bad example.  But Psycho and Scream are the exceptions that prove the rule.)

Police/Action Dramas

Furious 7 - lots of stunts with cars.  RIP Paul Walker

Sicario - a really good police drama starring Emily Blunt as a DEA office, Josh Brolin as an enforcement "cowboy" and Benicio Del Toro as the guy who does "what is necessary" to fight the Drug War.  Really a though-provoking movie.  

With this category division in mind, my Best Film nomineees would be

It Follows

Mad Max - Fury Road

Spotlight

The Big Short

The Martian 

Sicario

maybe The Revenant

Best of Bond, Part VI

The Pierce Brosnan Years

While Timothy Dalton gave the franchise depth and emotional darkness, the returns at the box office were poor.  After two films the franchise went into a hiatus for several years, to return with Pierce Brosnan as the new Bond.  Brosnan had been the first choice to replace Roger Moore, and he was a natural for the part of Bond.  With more charm and elan than Dalton, he helped re-popularize the franchise.

And the Brosnan years started well.  Goldeneye is widely recognized as a great Bond film.  But each of the following films was weak in some way.  By the end of the Brosnan run, the films were sinking into the same trap that ruined the Moore movies: an excess of silly gadgetry, too many recycled plots, and a few really awful casting choices.  But even the otherwise awful Die Another Day features great supporting work by Halle Berry - all of the films have some redeeming qualities.

Let's recall the criteria in this series of evaluations again:

• Bond – who the actor is, how good he is, and what he brings to the role
• the Villain- Mr. Big, Scaramanga, etc.  I judge the films on how compelling the villain is.
• the Bond Women – some films have few, some have many, but I’m pretty sure all have at least one. The quality ranges from Denise Richards’s absurd nuclear physicist to, of course, Mrs. Bond herself, not to mention Pussy Galore
• the Good Guys – M, Q, Moneypenny, Felix Leiter in his many incarnations and other sidekicks
• the Henchmen on the other side like Jaws, Oddjob, and Nick-Nack.
• the gadgets – not just judging how neat the gadgets are, but whether they were unwisely allowed to take over the film (as often happened with the later Roger Moore filims)
• whatever else I happen to think of