An interesting statistic I heard the other day: 90% of crimes occur on rental property. The source was credible, but what his foundation for the statistic may have been, I couldn’t say.

According to a Times/Bloomberg poll, only 23% of registered voters approve of Bush’s job performance. This is down from a high of 92% in October 2001. That means more than 2/3 of the people who now disapprove of his job performance changed their mind at some point.

To balance out the serious discussion of the soul, I figured I’d link to a study on more temporal matters:
Nice guys really do finish last.

NICE guys knew it, now two studies have confirmed it: bad boys get the most girls. The finding may help explain why a nasty suite of antisocial personality traits known as the “dark triad” persists in the human population, despite their potentially grave cultural costs.

The traits are the self-obsession of narcissism; the impulsive, thrill-seeking and callous behaviour of psychopaths; and the deceitful and exploitative nature of Machiavellianism. At their extreme, these traits would be highly detrimental for life in traditional human societies. People with these personalities risk being shunned by others and shut out of relationships, leaving them without a mate, hungry and vulnerable to predators.

But being just slightly evil could have an upside: a prolific sex life, says Peter Jonason at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. “We have some evidence that the three traits are really the same thing and may represent a successful evolutionary strategy.”

Jonason and his colleagues subjected 200 college students to personality tests designed to rank them for each of the dark triad traits. They also asked about their attitudes to sexual relationships and about their sex lives, including how many partners they’d had and whether they were seeking brief affairs.

What’s more, this tendency holds true across cultures. But, don’t worry nice guys, I’ve read that women tend to prefer nice guys for child rearing and family support purposes.

I figure a nice discussion of the existence and nature of the human soul is just the kind of light topic we need to kick off a Tuesday morning. Actually, an interesting discussion on the subject erupted in the comments of the George Carlin post, and I thought they deserved front page treatment.

Jason:

But, when I sleep, I dream some of the time. There is still something going on in my brain.

If there is nothing after death, then the last electrons firing though my brain would be the onces carrying the pain of my organs failing. Not restful, nor peaceful.

The term “Rest in Peace” usually refers to a soul, not the decaying corpse of a former mammal.

T:

The suffering you describe happens whether there is an afterlife or not. The “pain of organ failure” can happen for weeks, month, or years. Ask a diabetic with peripheral neuropathy causing incessant leg pain, or someone with emphysema fighting for breath for years. Christian or atheist, their suffering is often at its least in the few moments before death, compared with the time leading up to that point.

Rare is the occasion where I’m witness to someone actively painfully fighting death, or exhibiting pain. In many cases, organ failure prior to death seems to have its own narcotic and analgesic effect. Renal failure and respiratory failure blunt awareness. The most common scene I see is the family huddled around a loved one who has been unresponsive for several minutes to hours, taking possibly a last breath, a long pause (sometimes twenty seconds or so), followed by another breath. And then none. And then a peace that is final, and yet not much different from the moment before where there was just unconsciousness, a heartbeat, a rare breath, and an otherwise still body.

If in a particular case, the last moments are painful, anxious, or filled with fear, then the moment that that ends would peaceful. I just can’t honestly recall a hospital or nursing home death that was like that. Trauma cases probably differ, and someone like an ER physician would be witness to that.

I could see someone believing a soul travels out of the body at death, but I have trouble believing that someone “can’t image” it being possible that such a thing isn’t so. I know things that I see. There’s a bit less of a dead dog on the side of the road each day, until eventually there’s nearly nothing there to indicate it was ever there. But we saw it there so we know it was. But what is the evidence for the notion that an invisible life essence of some kind survived the death, left the body, and traveled to parts unknown at the time of death? And how can it be that such a notion is nearly universally accepted (at least in the case of dead people–opinions about dead dogs vary, I imagine), so that it’s “unimaginable” that it isn’t so?

Is the finality of death “unimaginable” because it’s so sad or cruel that it just can’t be allowed to be true? Is it unimaginable because the evidence for an afterlife is just too compelling to ignore? Or is it unimaginable because that’s what we’ve been told down through the ages, and nothing’s more compelling than someone professing to having received the gift of a revelation?

Me:

I think the need to imagine a soul comes from the difficulty in perceiving the difference between a live body and a dead body in a way that explains the functioning in the former and the lack of functioning in the latter.

Traditionally, humans have used the supernatural to explain that which they couldn’t understand. Death is/was one of the most important of those things.

Hence, you get the soul. Or maybe, if your an ancient Egyptian, you’d explain it as the ka.

The Egyptians believed that Khnum created the bodies of children on a potter’s wheel and inserted them into women’s bodies. Depending on the region, Egyptians believed that Heket or Meskhenet, was the creator of each person’s Ka, breathing it into them at the instant of their birth as the part of their soul that made them be, alive.

In the modern day, you have Descarte wrestling with a distinction between mind and matter and Leibniz positing a conglomeration of minutely aware monads – the stuff of which matter and mind is made of jointly. There are a pantheon of great minds wrestling with the idea.

As our knowledge of physics, mechanics, electronics, etc. has gotten better; it’s less of a mystery as to how a complex system like the human body can go from functional to non-functional. Still up in the air is how the machine goes from unaware to self-aware.

Not that these are perfect comparisons, but just one data point.

Dow Jones Industrial Average:

January 21, 1993 – 3,256.81
January 20, 2001 – 10,659.98
June 23, 2008 – 11,842.36

Clinton: Days – 2,921; Average daily gain – 2.534; Net change – 7,403.13; Percentage change – 227.31%.

Bush: Days – 2,711; Average daily gain – 0.436; Net change – 1,182.38; Percentage change – 0.11%.

George Carlin, one of the great comedians, has died at the age of 71 of heart failure. One of the things I most appreciated about his humor was his attention to language and the rhythm of his routine. He was very much an artist.

I’m probably going to butcher this anecdote, but a former boss of mine told a story about taking a train ride some time back. One of the passengers in the car got he and the other passengers in the car going around telling jokes. My boss says he held his own pretty well, but the initiating passenger had them all beat. So, after a while, my boss asks, “Excuse me, but aren’t you George Carlin.” The initiating passenger says, “Why would you say a thing like that? I haven’t once mentioned raping the Pope.” It was George Carlin.

Update I was happy there was a lot of Carlin coverage today. I was less happy about all of the “Seven Dirty Words” coverage. That’s an important bit of cultural history, but in my estimation, it’s far from Carlin’s best work. Higher up in my mind(but this is just one that jumps to mind, not necessarily his best work either) was this piece of work (following the outstanding “Advertising Lullaby”) which is representative of Carlin’s work – caustic with careful attention to the rhythm and language of the bit; and biting because he unafraid to gore the sacred cow:

When it comes to bullshit, big-time, major league bullshit, you have to stand in awe of the all-time champion of false promises and exaggerated claims, religion. No contest. No contest. Religion. Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told. Think about it. Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever ’til the end of time!

But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He’s all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can’t handle money! Religion takes in billions of dollars, they pay no taxes, and they always need a little more. Now, you talk about a good bullshit story. Holy Shit!

I just thought I’d mention that I’m not a big fan of United Airlines. Their business plan seems to be a matter of shifting all burdens of uncertainty onto their customers such that they have full plane loads of people ready to take off at their own convenience. I expect some hassles when flying. It just goes with the territory. But, somehow, with United you just get an extra feeling of indifference on the part of the company toward its customers.

I probably wouldn’t mention it if this is the first time I’d been on a trip and felt particularly annoyed by United. Most notable on this trip was the hour long delay at Dulles in getting our bags. The flight itself was only an hour from wheels up to wheels down. Then, while we were waiting for our trip back, they had apparently overbooked three or four different flights, including ours.

I don’t have any particular loyalty to any other airlines, they’re mostly just a commodity with similar levels of service — at least to an occasional traveler such as myself. But, in the future, I’ll probably spend a couple of extra bucks to avoid United and see if they’re unique or whether I just haven’t had bad luck with the other carriers yet. Apparently, I’m not the only one with a low opinion of United. In fairness, I do have to mention that there was an extremely pleasant and helpful counter person when we were checking in. We tried to use one of the self-check terminals and just got an uninformative “unable to process, please see attendant” message. The attendant was fast, pleasant, and got the job done.