Agatha Christie on determinism and criminal justice

August 19, 2017 • 2:30 pm
Reader John found a passage in a nearly 90 year old Agatha Christie novel that presages the views of Sam Harris, Robert Sapolsky, and many other determinists on the application of determinism to our justice system. This is what John sent:
I  just read an Agatha Christie novel called “The Murder at the Vicarage” (published in 1930), and I found the following passage very interesting. Given your thoughts on determinism and capital punishment, I thought you’d enjoy reading it as well.
It is a conversation between a doctor (Haydock) and a vicar (Clement). The doctor is speaking first. The first-person narrator is the vicar.
The text follows; note that the doctor doesn’t say that people shouldn’t be punished, but that they should be sequestered to keep them out of society (he doesn’t mention rehabilitation or deterrence—other valid reasons for putting someone away). Emphases are mine.
************

“We think with horror now of the days when we burnt witches. I believe the day will come when we will shudder to think that we ever hanged criminals.” [Doctor]

“You don’t believe in capital punishment?” [Vicar]

“It’s not so much that.” He paused. “You know,” he said slowly, “I’d rather have my job than yours.”

“Why?”

“Because your job deals very largely with what we call right and wrong—and I’m not at all sure that there’s any such thing. Suppose it’s all a question of glandular secretion. Too much of one gland, too little of another—and you get your murderer, your thief, your habitual criminal. Clement, I believe the time will come when we’ll be horrified to think of the long centuries in which we’ve punished people for disease—which they can’t help, poor devils. You don’t hang a man for having tuberculosis.”

“He isn’t dangerous to the community.”

“In a sense he is. He infects other people. Or take a man who fancies he’s the Emperor of China. You don’t say how wicked of him. I take your point about the community. The community must be protected. Shut up these people where they can’t do any harm—even put them peacefully out of the way—yes, I’d go as far as that. But don’t call it punishment. Don’t bring shame on them and their innocent families.”

I looked at him curiously. “I’ve never heard you speak like this before.”

“I don’t usually air my theories abroad. Today I’m riding my hobby. You’re an intelligent man, Clement, which is more than some parsons are. You won’t admit, I dare say, that there’s no such thing as what is technically termed, ‘Sin,’ but you’re broadminded enough to consider the possibility of such a thing.”

“It strikes at the root of all accepted ideas,” I said.

“Yes, we’re a narrow-minded, self-righteous lot, only too keen to judge matters we know nothing about. I honestly believe crime is a case for the doctor, not the policeman and not the parson. In the future, perhaps, there won’t be any such thing.”

“You’ll have cured it?”

“We’ll have cured it. Rather a wonderful thought…”

*********

As Jake said at the end of The Sun Also Rises, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

This passage is remarkably prescient. Thanks to John for transcribing it!

Ice cream versus “frozen dairy desserts”?

August 19, 2017 • 1:15 pm

For years I’ve been buying Breyers ice cream, thinking that it really was “ice cream”, which, according to Business Insider (BI), is legally stipulated by the Food and Drug Administration to be this:

In order to qualify as ice cream, a product must meet two criteria:

1. Ice cream must contain a minimum of 10% dairy milkfat.

2. Ice cream must have no more than 100% overrun and weigh no less than 4.5 lbs. per gallon.

But what the heck is “overrun,” you ask? Well overrun is the amount of air that is whipped into the ice cream base during freezing and is usually presented by a percentage. For example, with 100% overrun, for every gallon of ice cream base you would wind up with 2 gallons of finished ice cream.

The more air churned into the ice cream base, the lighter and fluffier the texture. A product with low overrun will be more dense and heavier. The FDA regulates the amount of overrun in ice cream in order to prevent unscrupulous manufacturers from producing and selling an ice cream product that is mainly air instead of cream. (Thanks, U.S. government!)

Now I don’t buy ice cream near as often as I used to, what with watching more carefully the stuff I ingest, but I do look at ice cream in the grocery store, and rarely buy a carton, which I’ve learned to eat directly from the carton with a spoon (not if I have visitors!) rather than put in a bowl, for this method of ingestion reduces intake.  It did tick me off, however, when some ice cream manufacturers, including Breyers, reduced the standard half-gallon carton by 25% to make it 1.5 quarts instead of two. And they did that, as far as I’m concerned, to increase profits, hoping the consumer wouldn’t notice the downsizing. (I wrote them a letter at the time but can’t remember the reply.)

Now, when I went shopping today, I noticed that many of the flavors of Breyers didn’t have “ice cream” written on the cartons. “Were they really ice cream?”, I asked myself. Well, you have to look closely to see, as in this one:

And there, written in small letters at the bottom, it says “frozen dairy dessert”. That’s not legally ice cream. Flavor after flavor I looked at said that, though a few flavors did say “ice cream”.

What’s the difference?  As BI notes, “Anything with less than 10% milkfat and/or more than 100% overrun cannot use the term ‘ice cream’ officially, hence the designation of ‘frozen dairy dessert’.”

Well, most consumers aren’t going to inspect the top for that designation, I suspect. And I wondered how many of Breyers’s products are real ice cream versus “frozen dairy desserts”. BI says this:

A company may sell multiple types of dairy-based products from line to line. For example, Breyers sells both ice cream (their original “Natural” line) and frozen dairy desserts (the entirety of the Breyers Blasts! line), which include many of the candy flavors like Reese’s.

So I googled “Breyers Ice Cream”, looking for real ice cream, and found this link (click on screenshot to go to site):

And it takes you a page that includes this (and more flavors):


I would have thought these were all ice cream since they’re on the linked page, and the bit at the top implies to me that they’re ice cream (“we start with fresh cream”, etc.).

But they’re not. You have to click on each flavor to find out if it’s “ice cream” or “frozen dairy dessert”.  Here’s a real ice cream:

And here’s a frozen dairy dessert:

Sometimes you can’t even tell from the description, but have to click on the “See nutrition facts, ingredients, and more arrow” to find out. Here’s one that used to be a staple for me:

But if you click on the arrow, you see this:

So caveat emptor: read the carton if you’re looking for real ice cream (I realize that it won’t make a difference to many readers). There were a surprisingly large number of “frozen dairy desserts” on the page you get when you click on the “Breyers Ice Cream” link shown above.

When I buy ice cream now, and I don’t know when I will, I’ll stick to real ice cream, some of the small gourmet types like Ben & Jerry’s, or a local staple, Blue Bunny (made in Iowa), which proudly bears “Ice Cream” on its carton. (And yes, I know that once Blue Bunny “Cookie Dough” Ice Cream was recalled because of Listeria contamination.) And even Blue Bunny has downsizing: this one’s 46 ounces, others are the now standard 48 ounces (1.5 quarts).

Blue Bunny doesn’t mess around, and although they have “lite” ice cream, the vast bulk of their product is the real thing, and I absolutely love their “double strawberry”: strawberry ice cream with big pieces of strawberry in it as well as swirls of strawberry sauce. It comes in the 48 ounce tub.

So get off my lawn with your “frozen dairy desserts”!

In light of Barcelona, what, if anything, do we do about immigration?

August 19, 2017 • 11:15 am

I don’t think there’s any number of Islamist terrorist attacks that will make people stop and think about the issue of immigration, which allows the entry of some people likely (or sworn) to commit such attacks. Indeed, I am leary of trying to curb refugees into Europe or the U.S., for, at least in the U.S., immigration is the lifeblood of our country. But the mere suggestion that we examine immigration or screen immigrants has become taboo, and may be ineffectual anyway given that many Muslims living in Europe or the U.S. have already lived there a while, with many being citizens.

Over at Areo, A. R. Devine does see a problem, and discusses it in his frank article “After Barcelona: Let the denial and excuses begin.” (Devine is identified as “a writer and published author. He won the Orwell Prize in 2010 for his blog, ‘Working with the Underclass,’ written under the nom de plume of Winston Smith.”) Here Devine expresses the dilemma that many of us face, as our progressive liberalism conflicts with the knowledge that a regressive religion has an extremist wing that kills innocent people and is “hostile to liberal ideas”:

The Jeremy Corbyns, Ken Livingstones, Cenk Uygurs, and Sally Kohns of this world and many of their supporters will grasp at anything but admit the truth that the Islamic faith has a problem with both violent and nonviolent extremism. When you want to talk about Islamic extremism they will bring up the fact that all religions have their extremists. This is undoubtedly true, but there is a qualitative difference between an extreme Mormon and his strange underwear collection and a Wahhabi hate preacher who believes Western women are whores who should be driven over and maimed beneath the axles of a speeding van.

An extremist Christian will go on an anti-abortion march, scream at you about the fiery depths of hell, and then go home and pray for sinners (yes, in some cases, they’ll do much worse). An extremist Buddhist will meditate too much and bore you to death about karma. An extremist Hindu will definitely kick your ass if you try to eat his cow. However, there is only one religion where its extremists (and there are many as it’s a spectrum) believe some or all of the following: gay people should be killed (happens in many Islamic countries at the hands of the state or a mob), those who wish to leave Islam should be killed or imprisoned (the law in several Muslim countries), and women should be stoned to death for sex outside marriage.

And we have invited a fair amount of individuals who hold these attitudes into Europe, courtesy of our immigration policies over the last few years. It’s not all, certainly not, anyone who says that is clueless. But it’s enough that we are seeing problems and attacks erupting around Europe. The challenge is confronting and changing these attitudes without sliding into bigotry.

Devine doesn’t offer a solution but does make two observations: that European politicians are largely ignoring the problem, and at their peril; and that there’s a general failure among liberals to discuss frankly the terrorism that’s plaguing Europe:

And because some European politicians have provided little to no screening and have not efficiently regulated the numbers migrating from the Islamic world, with each terror attack bigotry and hatred towards the genuine moderate Muslims will grow — which I utterly condemn. I worry that not dealing with this issue honestly will not bode well for sentiments against liberal and secular Muslims. So, well done to Angela Merkel and the EU for all of this.

And this:

Over the next few days, before the bodies in Barcelona are laid to rest, the legions of  self-hating Western apologists will spend most of their anger either denying the problem or blaming the West for these attacks.

I read one post on social media. It was written by the type of person who had harped on continuously about Charlottesville for the past few days. But when it came to Barcelona, they described these attacks as nothing but a footnote in the weekly news that should be given less attention. I doubt the victim’s families see the murders of their loved ones as nothing to cause a fuss about.

Or ignoring the issue. Horrible as the violence in Charlottesville was, it’s not comparable to what’s going on repeatedly in Europe (a second attack was foiled in Spain after five perpetrators were killed, but now a Moroccan man has stabbed two Finns to death and injured ten in Turku, Finland, and it’s being investigated as a “terrorist attack.”  No country in the West, it seems, is immune. HuffPo has six stories on the front page related to Charlottesville, and a buried one on Turku, but nothing on Spain. Some “Leftist” bloggers I follow who put up post after post about Nazis and Charlottesville, haven’t said a word about the attack in Barcelona.

Is it “whataboutery” to fault people for concentrating on Charlottesville and largely ignoring what’s happening in Europe? Part of that is certainly due to the well known parochialism of Americans, who are either ignorant of or don’t care much about what happens overseas. But Devine is right: part of it is an attempt to deliberately ignore religiously-inspired terrorism because it conflicts with a Regressive Left narrative: people of color are to be excused because they’ve been oppressed, and the oppression is simply the West’s (or white mens’) fault. To me, no matter what the West did—and we did intrude in bad ways in the Middle East—that’s not an excuse for the terrorist murder of innocent people. After all, the value of an American life is no different from the value of a Finnish or Spanish life. If we’re truly liberal, our concern shouldn’t stop at the U.S. border.

Yet I have no solution, and I invite readers to tell me what they’d do were they in charge of immigration to Europe or the U.S. Would you screen people? If so, how?

I asked one diehard liberal friend, who knows a bit about foreign affairs, to say what he/she thought about what to do. The response didn’t provide a solution but did raise a red flag:

“Nation states need definable, controllable borders. EU leaders implicitly refuse to recognize this. The elections in EU countries this year may be the last in which centrists (eg, Macron and Merkel) win.  But four or five years from now?”

Caturday felid trifecta: Snow leopard cubs in Toronto; cat mayor of Alaskan town dies; cat gently pets tiny frog

August 19, 2017 • 10:00 am

Today’s trifecta includes a nice video of a rare snow leopard (Panthera uncia) with her two adorable cubs in the Toronto zoo. Sadly, there were originally three cubs but one died of pneumonia. Listen to their little squeaks! And look at mom’s tail!

They’re now three months old, and, fingers crossed, will grow up to be among the world’s most beautiful wild cats. It’s a great pity that these animals are confined in zoos. One could say that studying them there will help conserve them in the wild, but I don’t find that argument convincing, nor do I think that people seeing the cat will be moved to engage in conservation efforts.

*********

Several readers sent me notices of the death of Stubbs, the mayor of the tiny town of Talkeetna, Alaska (population 900). Stubbs was a cat, and, according to the CBC, was elected the real mayor in a town vote in 1998 (there’s no human mayor).  As the CBC reported on July 25:

The animal’s owners announced the cat’s death late Saturday [July 22] in a statement.

“Stubbs lived for 20 years and 3 months,” the family wrote.

“He was a trooper until the very last day of his life; meowing at us throughout the day to pet him or to come sit on the bed with him and let him snuggle and purr for hours in our lap. Thank you, Stubbs, for coming into our lives for the past 31 months; you are a remarkable cat and we will dearly miss you. We loved the time we were allowed to spend with you.”

According to Stubb’s family, Mayor Stubbs, as the cat was most commonly known, went to bed Thursday and died overnight, KTVA-TV reports.

Stubbs lived in the local general store where he became a tourist attraction. He has his own Wikipedia page, which reports another true fact:

Every afternoon, Stubbs went to a nearby restaurant and drank water laden with catnip out of a wineglass or margarita glass.

Here he is having his restorative:


And in his usual position:

Stubbs’s life had its rough spots:

On August 31, 2013, Stubbs was attacked by a dog. He was placed under heavy sedation at a veterinary hospital 70 miles away in Wasilla [JAC: former home of Sarah Palin], having suffered a punctured lung, a fractured sternum, and a deep wound in his side. A crowd-funding page was set up to help pay his medical bills. Stubbs remained in the veterinary hospital for nine days before returning to the upstairs room of the general store; he was subsequently discouraged from roaming. Donations toward his care were received from around the world; the surplus was given to an animal shelter and to the local veterinary clinic.

Other perils Stubbs escaped from included being shot by teenagers with BB guns and falling into a restaurant’s deep fryer (which was switched off and cool at the time). Other exploits included having hitched a ride to the outskirts of Talkeetna on a garbage truck.

I visited Talkeetna in April, 2006 to debate creationist Hugh Ross (the last such debate I’ll do) at the annual meeting of the Alaska Bar Association. Being lawyers, they gave me a generous honorarium, which I vowed to spend traveling a bit around the state. I drove up to Talkeetna, where there’s a decent-sized airport, to catch a bush plane to Mount Denali (former Mt. McKinley). I did know about Stubbs and tried to visit him, but, sadly, the general store was closed. But found a friendly cat at the Talkeetna airport, where I caught a plane that landed on a glacier by Denali. Here’s the cat, whose name I’ve forgotten (ten to one some reader knows it):

Here’s the view of Denali from inside the bush plane (I got to sit next to the pilot):

Our landing spot:

The plane! The plane! (It had to taxi back and forth for half an hour to pack the snow sufficiently to be able to take off again.)

And Denali (left rear) and me (yes, I know this is getting self-aggrandizing, but it was a great adventure, and all on the ABA’s dime):

And here’s Talkeetna’s main street. As you can see, it’s tiny, and serves largely as a jumping-off spot for trips into the bush or mountains:

Although Mayor Stubbs is gone, he had a long life and was well loved. The good news is that the CBC reports that a replacement is being groomed:

Although Stubbs is gone, one of his owners’ kittens might be ready to take up his mayoral mantle.

“Amazingly, Denali has the exact personality as Stubbs,” the family wrote of the kitten. “He loves the attention, he’s like a little puppy when he’s around people. We couldn’t have asked for a better understudy than Denali — he really has followed in Stubbs’ pawprints in just about everything.”

*********

Finally, here’s a kitten gently petting a tiny frog. I wonder if the frog is toxic, as the cat seems to be repulsed at the end after licking its paw. I don’t know where the meows are coming from.

h/t: Michael

Honey may be gone

August 19, 2017 • 9:15 am

Except for a day or so a while back, my duck Honey has been at the pond every day for her 7 a.m. breakfast and 3 p.m. dinner, and comes swimming to me rapidly when she hears my whistle.

This morning, looking forward to a quiet communion with the girl, I found she had disappeared.  I’m hoping this is just a temporary absence, but she may have flown away, as did Daisy the other day. I noticed yesterday that, after her usual postprandial preening, Honey flapped her wings vigorously, and they were large, full-sized wings. That means, of course, that she’s flight-ready, and that means she may head off soon. I’ve noticed she’s been increasingly skittish and constantly looking around—even if there’s nothing to see—and I wonder if that’s pre-migration jitters.

Anyway, if she is gone for good, here’s the last photo I took of her, swimming by the lily pads yesterday afternoon. (They’re convenient places to put corn as she can gobble up a lot at once without having to dabble, though one needs good aim to throw the corn onto the vegetation.) You can see a few grains of corn on the pads.

With apologies to Thomas Wolfe:

A duck, a leaf, an unfound door; of a duck, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten feathers. Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother’s face; from the prison of her flesh we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth. Which of us has known a duck? Which of us has looked into a mallard’s heart? Which of us has not remained forever pond-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone? O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among rippling waters on this most weary unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a duck, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When? O lost, and by the wind grieved, duck, come back again.

Readers’ wildlife photos

August 19, 2017 • 8:45 am

Thanks to the many readers who sent me photos, and remember that I can always use good ones. Today we have a panoply from several readers.

Reader “DiscoveredJoys” sent some photos of gulls, whose beauty—like that of starlings—is often ignored because they’re common. His comments (and those of all photographers) are indented.

A couple of pictures of ordinary herring gulls (I think). [JAC: probably Larus argentatus]. The one resting is actually on the uncompleted battlements of Beaumaris Castle in Anglesey, Wales. (Welsh: Biwmares French: beaux marais ‘beautiful marsh’). Beaumaris Castle (actually a fortified palace) was built to the latest technological standards of the time, but was not completed as Edward I  needed the money for other purposes.

The other herring gull is just taking off from the top of a pontoon at the  end of Beaumaris  pier.

James Lindsay sent a “spot the” photo, but it’s dead easy, so I’ll put the reveal below the first photo. There’s no identification, so weigh in below if you know what these beasts are:

I have no idea what these little critters are, but they’re excellent lichen mimics. These were spotted in the bonsai exhibit at the North Carolina Arboretum in Asheville, North Carolina.
Walter Carson sent these photos of a tropical caterpillar; perhaps Lou Jost, who works in Ecuador, can give us an ID. The caterpillar is clearly aposematically colored, so may be toxic.
 I recently documented an outbreak of this caterpillar on Inga edulis in the Napo Province of Ecuador.  The caterpillar did not have urticating spines (I grabbed many of them) and I ate several after roasting them.  I think it is a Saturniidae.  I was not able to rear any.  Do you have any idea what this is?
And from reader Greg:
This may not meet your quality standards, but here’s a photo of Tule elk (Cervus canadensis nannodes) taken last week at Point Reyes, California.  A bull and part of his harem were browsing the weeds by the side of the road near the lighthouse. I’m not an expert photographer, and did not have a proper camera with me, so this was snapped on my phone from the car window as we drove past.  Seconds later, the bull turned and displayed his full rack face-on, but I missed that shot.

Saturday: Hili dialogue (and Leon monologue)

August 19, 2017 • 6:30 am

The weekend is here: it’s Saturday, August 19, 2017, and National Soft Serve Ice Cream Day. Fun fact: “An average dairy cow can produce enough milk in her lifetime to make a little over 9,000 gallons of ice cream.” That’s more ice cream than I can eat in my lifetime: even if you ate a half gallon a day, it would take you nearly fifty years. It’s National Aviation Day in the U.S., and here in Chicago we have the annual Air and Water show, a highly touted spectacle that I’ve never seen. The weather in Chicago is predicted to be lovely today, but also partly cloudy on both Sunday and Eclipse Monday, so I’m hoping that I can see the Sun on Monday at about 1:18—the darkest it will get here. Don’t forget to get your ISO-approved eclipse glasses. On the local news yesterday I saw people standing in line for hours to get them, and some pairs were going for nearly a thousand dollars each on eBay (they’re worth about $1). Such is the law of supply and demand.

Not much happened in the world on August 19 compared to other days. In 1692, during the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts, five people—one woman and four men, including a pastor—were hanged after being convicted of witchcraft. During the year of the witch mania in Salem, 20 people (14 of them women) were executed, while five others, including two infants, died in jail. Another black mark for faith.  In 1909, the first race at the Indianapolis motor speedway (race track) took place. Back then it was 250 miles, now, of course, it’s the “Indy 500”. Even at the first race, a driver and his mechanic were killed. On August 19, 1934, a referendum in Germany merged the offices of Chancellor and President since President Hindenburg had died a short time before. The people’s nod went to Adolf Hitler, who became head of state—der Führer. Finally, and I remember this well, though it seems not so long ago, in 2003 a car-bomb attack on United Nations headquarters in Iraq killed, among the 22 dead, the agency’s local head, Sérgio Vieira de Mello, by all accounts a wonderful man and a dedicated worker.

Notables born on this day include John Dryden (1631), Orville Wright (1871), Coco Chanel (1883), Ogden Nash (1902), Malcolm Forbes (1919), Gene Roddenberry (1921), Ginger Baker (1939), and Bill “Bubba” Clinton (1946). Those who died on this day include Blaise Pascal (1662), George Gamow (1968), Groucho Marx (1977), Linus Pauling (1994).

I’m amazed that Baker, rated by many as the world’s best rock drummer, is still alive, just as I’m amazed that Keith Richards is still alive. Here’s Baker, along with his Cream bandmates Jack Bruce and Eric Clapton, doing what is perhaps their most famous song, though my personal favorite, by far, is “Badge“:

Oh, hell, I want to put up “Badge, too”: here it is from the band’s 2005 reunion at Royal Albert Hall. What a great song: I love the driving bass intro, though here the guitar break is different from (and perhaps not as compelling as) the one on the original release, but Clapton still shows his chops. The song was written by Clapton and George Harrison. A note from Wikipedia: as Harrison recounts, “when the song was being written, Ringo [Starr] walked in drunk and gave us that line about the swans living in the park.”

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili show some rare (but superficial) concern for her staff:
Hili: There is a horrible amount of mosquitos here.
Cyrus: But they are not biting you.
Hili: That’s true but it’s a pity about humans.
In Polish:
Hili: Strasznie dużo komarów.
Cyrus: Przecież ciebie nie gryzą.
Hili: To prawda, ale ludzi żal.

And Leon, still on a hiking vacation in Southern Poland, is kvetching, as all cats constantly do.

Leon: Swings are cool but I would prefer a hammock.

Here’s relaxed red squirrel photographed by reader Taskin, half of Gus’s staff. 

A tw**t sent by reader Barry. What is the disturbed moggie trying to say?

https://twitter.com/Lifewithacat/status/898555470482243586

And one found by Grania: