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Human Agency and the Exaptation of Selection
27 January 2013
My title today, Human Agency and the Exaptation of Selection, is perhaps not a very good title, but if anyone out there has read a representative selection of my posts they will be aware that all of these topics — human agency, exaptation, and natural selection — are matters to which I have returned time and again, and I feel like I beginning to see my way clear to a point at which I can systematically tie together these themes into something more comprehensive than occasional remarks and comments of the sort that are the usual fare of blog posts.
Macro-Historical Revolutions
All macro-historical revolutions to date have simply happened to us; they were not planned or chosen or made to happen, they just happened. And before the emergence of human agency in history, all the great transitions of natural history — i.e., the natural equivalent of a macro-historical revolution — simply happened without design, purpose, or direction.
Human efforts (including individual choices) in constituting historical realities have, to date, been like the myriad accidents of natural history that together and cumulatively constitute natural history. Even though human consciousness gives meaning and value to these individual decisions, and at times we participate in collective meanings and values, none of this has yet risen to the level of consciously constituting an epoch of history on the basis of human meanings and values. We have given meaning and value to circumstances that we have (accidentally) brought about, but have not brought about a civilization or a way of life in response to a determination to realize particular meanings and values. This is the social equivalent of Schopenhauer's assertion that, while we are free to do what we want, we are not free to want what we want.
To shape the future of history, to plan for the kind of civilization to come, and possibly even to create a kind of civilization consciously intended and brought into being, would be historically unprecedented on a scale beyond the unprecedented events of human history (such as I recently wrote about in Invariant Civilizational Properties in Futurist Scenarios, i.e., how it would be unprecedented for an invariant of civilization to be overturned), because the trend of human history being shaped by non-human forces is far older than human history, and far older than our species.
Naturalism and its Others
It is at this point that the naturalistically inclined philosopher of history must obviously and unavoidably part company with those who retain theological conceptions of the world and its development. The idea of the world, up until the emergence of human intelligence from human consciousness, being utterly unplanned, undirected, and undesigned is a rigorously (and indeed rigidly) naturalistic conception that excludes even the most distant and unconcerned creator of deism.
Even the religiously and theologically inclined who make no attempt to defy what science tells us about the world must retain some minimal sense of purpose and direction — perhaps a quasi-Aristotelian final cause — since without this there remains nothing upon which to pun one's beliefs that is not strictly a part of nature — no transcendent eschatology or soteriology.
It should be obvious from my other posts that I am writing from a rigorously naturalistic perspective, but sometimes one must be explicit about these things so as not to leave any wiggle room, so that one's naturalistic formulations will either be interpreted naturalistically or rejected tout court because they are naturalistic. What I have written above about unprecedented historical developments simply makes no sense is one deviates from a strict naturalism, and that is why I make it explicit here.
The Threshold of Agency
The imposition of human will upon unthinking and uncomprehending nature began in the most rudimentary ways — the chipping of stone for tools and the gathering of sufficient sustenance such that this might last beyond the next meal. At this level of planning and provision for the future, the human mind is no different from other mammalian minds, since we know that other mammals make rudimentary tools and store food for the future.
To define the point at which human planning and provision for the future exceed this common mammalian standard, and thereby also exceed the possibility of being entirely the result of instinct refined by natural selection, genetically encoded in our biology (and the ultimate limit of evolutionary psychology), involves a sorites paradox (i.e., the paradox of the heap). While we need not define a particular point that human planning exceeds the mammalian norm, we can content ourselves with a span of time (viz. between the emergence of biologically modern homo sapiens and the advent of the historical period strictly speaking, i.e., a span of time encompassing human prehistory). In accordance with what I have called the Truncation Principle, we can in fact recognize an historical discontinuity, even if that discontinuity comes about gradually.
Over some period of time, then, human planning and provision exceeded the mammalian norm and became something historically unprecedented. We tend to magnify this transition, calling ourselves the "rational animal" and associating our reason with that which is uniquely human. One of the great themes of our time is that of human beings asserting their control over the planet, assuming de facto right over the disposition of the biosphere. In fact, we don't even control our own history, much less the history of the planet. We affect our history and the natural history of our planet, but we do not control them.
We have risen to the level of micro-historical efficacy with the first rudimentary steps of tool making and food storage. We rose to the level of meso-historical efficacy in constituting human societies. These societies began as emergent accidents of human behavior, but I think that we can assert that, over time, we have consciously constituted at least a few limited examples of communities intentionally constituted to certain ends. We rose to the level of exo-historical efficacy in constituting the largest institutions and political entities that have dominated human history. Many of these institutions and political entities have also been accidents of history, but, again, I think that we can say that there are at least some explicit examples of the purposeful constitution of human institutions and political entities.
In other words, have passed at least three thresholds of agency defined in terms of ecological temporality. For human agency to rise to the level of macro-historical efficacy we would need to rise to the level of shaping entire eras of civilization and history. We aren't there yet. As with the natural historical emergence of human communities and later larger institutions, which began with historical accidents and were only later rationalized, human macro-history remains at the level of our accidental participation. Millions upon millions of conscious human actions were required to create the industrial revolution, but no one consciously sought to create the industrial revolution; although it was, in a sense, made by us, in a more important sense it simply happened to us.
The Problem of Progress
In several posts — Civilization and the Technium, Biology Recapitulates Cosmology, and Progress, Stagnation, and Retrogression among them — I have mentioned Kevin Kelly's explicit arguments for progress in his book What Technology Wants. I have mentioned this because, in terms of our current intellectual climate, he is an outlier, although among techno-philosophers he may represent something closer to a consensus. Among contemporary academic philosophers and historians, almost no one argues for progress — to do so is considered an unforgivable form of naïveté.
I mention this again here because the above treatment of human agency in terms of ecological temporality might provide a quantitative way to talk about human progress and the progress of human civilization that is not tied to the development of some particular technology. Any time anyone asserts that there has been progress because we now have airplanes and computers whereas once we did not, someone else responds by pointing to the moral horrors of the twentieth century, such as genocide, to demonstrate that technological progress cannot be conflated with moral progress. Moral progress requires an entirely separate argument, as does aesthetic progress. (So too, presumably religious, ideological, or eschatological progress, but I will not attempt to address any of these at present.)
The expanding scope of human agency through levels of ecological temporality can be interpreted as a kind of progress independent of any technological development. In so far as human agency is centrally implicated in human morality, the progress of human agency could even be interpreted as a form of moral progress. Now, this is an admittedly deceptive way to formulate it, because I do not here mean "moral" in the narrow sense of "ethical" but rather "moral" in the way we would use the term in a phrase like, "the moral lives of human beings." Another way to formulate this would be to call it human progress, but this is probably no improvement at all. I mean progress in the form of asserting human agency over the peculiarly human aspects of our lives — emotions, relationships, interactions, evaluations, creations, and so forth.
A Darwinian conception of history
A Darwinian conception of history and of civilization is simply a conception of history and civilization fully in accord with Darwin's thorough-doing naturalism, and especially the role of selection in the constitution of historical entities (like human history and human civilization). We can understand Darwinian conceptions of history and civilization as aspects of a Darwinian cosmology. The above formulations of the ecological temporal thresholds of human agency allow us to do this in an interesting way.
When human agency crosses a threshold from being subject to accidents, including its own cumulative accidents, to asserting control over the whole process of agency and its consequences — i.e., what it brings about — what is essentially happening is that human agency is taking over for natural selection; selection, or some part of selection, is transferred from nature to humanity. In other words, the expansion of human agency is the exaptation of selection. Selection that began as natural selection, taken over by the expanding agency of human beings, becomes human selection. This is exaptation not of organic structures, but of behavioral structures, i.e., exaptation on the order of the will.
To assert that the expansion of human agency is the exaptation of selection is to formulate a Darwinian conception of history and of civilization that does not need to declare the progress is impossible to account for in a selective paradigm, and also is not obligated to argue that progress is inherent in the very nature of things, which it is not.
One can understand the problematic idea of "progress" (which we may someday be able to take out of scare quotes) as the increasing human ability to impose human direction, purpose, and design upon history.
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Addendum on the Temporal Structures of Civilization
12 October 2012
Last August in The Temporal Structures of Civilization I suggested that we might think of early modern civilization — what I have called Modernism without Industrialism — as an abortive civilization. Modern civilization, sensu stricto, was preempted and essentially overtaken by industrialized civilization, or, as I now like to say, industrial-technological civilization.
Implicit in this claim is the idea (not explicitly formulated in my post of this past summer) that our civilization or any civilization might be suddenly and unaccountably preempted by a macro-historical revolution that changes everything, if only that revolution is sufficiently large and catastrophic. Those were my thoughts of high summer, and now it is fall and the rains have begun. I have been meaning to return to some of these themes, and the change in the weather is as good a reason as any to revisit my less-than-sunny summer thoughts.
The most studied macro-historical transitions in Western history are 1) the transition from classical antiquity to the middle ages, and 2) the transition from the middle ages to modernity. Both of these transitions have must to teach us, and it is remarkable that the differences between these two macro-historical revolutions are so schematic that they also seem to have been formulated to give us two radically different perspectives on what it means to make the transition from one form of civilization to another.
The transition from medievalism to modernism was gradual, continuous, and incremental; any attempt to draw a clear line between medieval civilization and modern civilization must adopt some conventions simply in order to make the distinctions, and in adopting historical conventions we know that we could have chosen our conventions differently.
Despite the gradual transition from medievalism to modernism, the medieval mind and the modern mind could not be more different. Their separation in time was gradual but the result was nearly absolute incommensurability. To formulate it in Aristotelian modalities, it was the accidents of of life that remained continuous in the transition from medievalism to modernity, even while the essence of life fundamentally changed. There is a sense in which we could say that there was an essentialist revolution that left accidents unchanged.
The transition from antiquity to medievalism, on the other hand, while it did take several centuries to consolidate as a macro-historical revolution, involved a violent break with the past and its traditions — actually, several violent breaks in tradition. There was the relative suddenness of the abandonment of classical religious traditions in favor of Christianity; there was the collapse of any unified Roman legal and political power in Western Europe; there was the break with the Eastern part of the Roman Empire, which continued on for another thousand years (turning itself into what Toynbee would have called a fossil civilization); there was the collapse the urban life in Western Europe and the flight from the cities, and with this came a radical economic transition from a unified system of commerce across the Roman Empire to a self-sufficient manorial system.
Although this transition from antiquity of medievalism involved a series of violent social dislocations, the scale of which have not been seen since in Western civilization (with the exception of the Black Death and industrialization), the medieval mind believed itself to be unchanged in essentials from the world of classical antiquity. It was common rhetorical and indeed an intellectual trope of the middle ages for people to speak of themselves as Romans and to assume that their world was simply a greatly diminished and impoverished Roman Empire. Rather than thinking in terms of a new civilization that had been born with the passing of classical antiquity, it was said that mundus senescit — the world grows old — and it was thought that the peoples of time were simply waiting for the old world to end.
From an historiographical perspective, medieval civilization is an historical phenomenon of great value, because it represents a fully contained macro-historical division of western history, with a more-or-less clearly defined beginning, middle, and end. In other words, we have the full arc of the story of medieval civilization.
Somewhere (I don't recall where as I write this) I read that someone characterized the upshot of Toynbee's historical effort as embodying the idea that civilizations are the proper unit of historical study. Civilizations are a unit of historical study — one unit among many other possible units of study — but every epistemic order of magnitude has its proper units of historical study. Those units are the "individuals" recognized by the conceptual infrastructure of a given epistemic order of magnitude.
Different objects of historical study will also mean different forms of historical transition between the objects in question. Civilizations have characteristic forms of transition. Demographic macro-historical transitions that affect the entire human population of the Earth, like the transitions from hunter-gatherer nomadism to agriculturalism, and then the transition from agriculturalism to industrialism, are of another order of magnitude. It is no wonder that the modernism of civilization gave way before the demographic revolution of industrialization; the latter is a far larger historical force that can easily swamp developments as relatively small as those on the scale of civilization.
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Axialization and Institutionalization
15 March 2012
In several posts I have suggested a generalization of Karl Jaspers idea of an "Axial Age." For Jaspers (and Lewis Mumford, and others who have followed them), the "Axial Age" was a unique period of human history in which peoples all over the world generated the religious and philosophical ideas that were to inform all subsequent civilization, and chronologically corresponded to the period from about the 8th to 3rd centuries BC. I call the generalization of the idea of a "Axial Age" "axialization," which seeks to understand the processes of Jasper's Axial Age as a general historical process that is not confined to the single instance Jaspers had in mind.
The posts I have written on this include (inter alia):
● The Axialization of the Nomadic Paradigm
● Axial Crisis or Axial Fulfillment?
I have just realized that axialization as an historical process is closely tied to institutionalization as an historical process. In so far as axialization involves a period of unusual intellectual innovation, creativity, and originality in which new ideas and new traditions emerge, it is to be expected that later less creative ages will seek to formulate, elaborate, and establish these intellectual innovations of an Axial Age, and this latter process is institutionalization.
The great religious traditions of the world's great divisions of civilizations that were the focus of Jaspers' conception of an Axial Age, I have previously observed, were all emergent from agricultural civilization, and, at least to a certain extent, reflect the concerns of agricultural civilization. In this spirit, I suggested that the the great cave paintings of the late Paleolithic in ice age Europe constituted an axialization of the nomadic paradigm of macro-history.
It now strikes me that not only were the great religious traditions of the world emergent from agricultural civilization, but all of these religions and all of their associated civilizations experienced both axialization and institutionalization under the agricultural paradigm. The institutions of organized religion that have largely served as the organizing principles of the associated civilizations were developed and formalized throughout the duration of agricultural civilization.
I suspect that, since the axialization of the nomadic period came so late in the human development of that period that this axialization never achieved institutionalization, both because the structures of nomadic life did not readily lend themselves to the establishment of institutions, and — just as importantly — because the macro-historical shift from nomadism to agriculturalism meant that the interest and focus of the greater bulk of the human population had shifted to other concerns with the emergence of settled agriculturalism. It is interesting to speculate what an institutionalization of nomadic axial ideas might have been, had settled civilization never emerged.
Agricultural civilization persisted for a period of time sufficient both for the axialization and institutionalization of the ideas implicit in this particular form of human life. Because the ideas implicit in agriculturalism received both axialization (an initial statement) and institutionalization (a definitive formulation), these ideas were not swept aside by the Industrial Revolution in the same way that the ideas implicit in the axialization of the Nomadic paradigm were swept away by agricultural civilization. The nomadic paradigm was swept away so completely by agricultural civilization that this entire epoch of human history was lost to us until it was recovered by the methods of scientific historiography. Throughout the agricultural paradigm, human beings knew nothing except the ideas of the agricultural paradigm. This gave agricultural civilization both a certain narrowness and a certain strength.
I speculated earlier that macro-history may exhibit a "speeding up" such that, while the axialization of the nomadic paradigm came very late in that very long-lasting paradigm, the axialization of the agricultural paradigm did not come nearly so late in the development of agriculturalism. Perhaps, I suggested, the axialization of the industrial paradigm will come even sooner in the relative history of that macro-historical division. But when I wrote that I was not counting on the fact that the institutionalization of the agricultural paradigm had given the axial ideas of agriculturalism a staying power beyond that macro-historical division itself.
Throughout most of the world today, agricultural civilization has been utterly swept away by the industrial revolution and ways of life have been radically change. Yet the ideas of agricultural civilization persist, and they persist partly because of their institutionalization and partly because nothing of commensurate scope and power has emerged to displace them.
Beyond the historical processes of axialization and institutionalization we may have to posit another stage — ossification — in which axial ideas are preserved beyond the macro-historical division that produced them. These ossified ideas serve a retrograde function in keeping human thought tied to a now-lapsed paradigm of human social interaction.
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What comes after civilization?
19 February 2012
Recently (in Don't Cry for the Papers) I wrote that, "Books will be a part of human life as long as there are human beings (or some successor species engaged in civilizational activity, or whatever cultural institution is the successor to civilization)." While this was only a single line thrown out as an aside in a discussion of newspapers and magazines, I had to pause over this to think about it and make sure that I would get my phrasing right, and in doing so I realized that there are several ideas implicit in this formulation.
Since I make an effort to always think in terms of la longue durée, I have conditioned myself to note that current forms (of civilization, or whatever else is being considered) are always likely to be supplanted by changed forms in the future, so when I said that books, like the poor, will always be with us, for the sake of completeness I had to note that human forms may be supplanted by a successor species and that civilization may be supplanted by a a successor institution. Both the idea of the post-human and the post-civilizational are interesting in their own right. I have briefly considered posthumanity and human speciation in Against Natural History, Right and Left (as well as other posts such as Addendum on the Avoidance of Moral Horror), but the idea of a successor to civilization is something that begs further consideration.
Now, in the sense, everything that I have written about futurist scenarios for the successor to contemporary industrial-technological civilization (which I have described in Three Futures, Another Future: The New Agriculturalism, and other posts) can be taken as attempts to outline what comes after civilization in so far as we understand civilization as contemporary industrial-technological civilization. This investigation of post-industrial civilization is an important aspect of an analytic and theoretical futurism, but we must go further in order to gain a yet more comprehensive perspective that places civilization within the longest possible historical context.
I have adopted the convention of speaking of "civilization" as comprising all settled, urbanized cultures that have emerged since the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution. This is not the use that "civilization" has in classic humanistic historiography, but I have discussed this elsewhere; for example, in Jacob Bronowski and Radical Reflection I wrote:
…Bronowski refers to "civilization as we know it" as being 12,000 years old, which means that he is identifying civilization with the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution and the emergence of settled life in villages and eventually cities.
Taking this long and comprehensive view of civilization, we still must contrast civilization with its prehistoric antecedents. When one realizes that the natural sciences have been writing the history of prehistory since the methods, the technologies, and the conceptual infrastructure for this have been developed since the late nineteenth century, and that paleolithic history itself admits of cultures (the Micoquien, the Mousterian, the Châtelperronian, the Aurignacian, and the Gravettian, for example), it becomes clear that "culture" is a more comprehensive category than "civilization," and that culture is the older category. The cultures of prehistory are the antecedent institutions to the institution of civilization. This immediately suggests, in the context of futurism, that there could be a successor institution to civilization that no longer could be strictly called "civilization" but which still constituted a human culture.
Thus the question, "What comes after civilization?" when understood in an appropriately radical philosophical sense, invites us to consider post-civilizational human cultures that will not only differ profoundly from contemporary industrial-technological civilization, but which will differ profoundly from all human civilization from the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution to the present day.
Human speciation, if it occurs, will profoundly affect the development of post-human, post-civilizational cultural institutions. I have mentioned in several posts (e.g., Gödel's Lesson for Geopolitics) that Francis Fukuyama felt obligated to add the qualification to this "end of history" thesis that if biotechnology made fundamental changes to human beings, this could result in a change to human nature, and then all bets are off for the future: in this eventuality, history will not end. Changed human beings, possibly no longer human sensu stricto, may have novel conceptions of social organization and therefore also novel conceptions of social and economic justice. From these novel conceptions may arise cultural institutions that are no longer "civilization" as we here understand civilization.
Above I wrote, "human speciation, if it occurs," and I should mention that my only hesitation here is that social or technological means may be employed in the attempt to arrest human evolution at more-or-less its present stage of development, thus forestalling human speciation. Thus my qualification on human speciation in no way arises from a hesitation to acknowledge the possibility. As far as I am concerned, human being is first and foremost biological being, and biological being is always subject to natural selection. However, technological intervention might possibly overtake natural selection, in which case we will continue to experience selection as a species, but it will be social selection and technological selection rather than natural selection.
In terms of radical scenarios for the near- and middle-term future, the most familiar on offer at present (at least, the most familiar that has some traction in the public mind) is that of the technological singularity. I have recounted in several posts the detailed predictions that have been made, including several writers and futurists who have placed definite dates on the event. For example, Vernor Vinge, who proposed the idea of the technological singularity, wrote that, "Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended." (This is from his original essay on the technological singularity published in 1993, which places the date of the advent of the technological singularity at 2023 or sooner; I understand that Mr. Vinge has since revised his forecast.)
To say that "the human era will be ended," is certainly to predict a radical development, since it postulates a post-human future within the life time of many now living today (much like the claim that, "Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power."). If I had to predict a radical post-human future in the near- to middle-term future I would opt not for post-human machine intelligence but for human speciation facilitated by biotechnology. This latter scenario seems to me far more likely and far more plausible than the technological singularity, since we already have the technology in its essentials; it is only a matter of refining and applying existing biotechnology.
I make no predictions and set no dates because the crowding of seven billion (and counting) human beings on a single planet militates against radical changes to our species. Social pressures to avoid speciation would make such a scenario unlikely in the near- to middle-term future. If we couple human speciation with the scenario of extraterrestrialization, however, everything changes, but this pushes the scenario further into the future because we do not yet possess the infrastructure necessary to extraterrestrialization. Again, however, as with human speciation through biotechnology, we have all the technology necessary to extraterrestrialization, and it is only a matter of refining and applying existing technologies.
From this scenario of human speciation coupled with extraterrestrialization there would unquestionably emerge post-human, post-civilizational cultural institutions that would be propagated into the distant future, possibly marginalizing, and possibly entirely supplanting, human beings and human civilization as we know it today. It is to be expected that these institutions will be directly related to the way of life adopted in view of such a scenario, and this way of life will be sufficiently different from our own that its institutions and its values and its norms would be unprecedented from our perspective.
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The Argument for Pastoralization
17 February 2012
More than a year ago I formulated the idea of pastoralization as a possible development of macro-historical significance, and as a possible successor form of civilization to present-day industrial-technological civilization. In that first formulation I wrote:
If humanity withdrew into sustainable cities with their own ability to grow produce, the gradually depopulated countryside would be free to be returned to wilderness or to be at the disposal of pastoralists, or both. Wild game would be available in the wilderness for those who wanted to hunt, thus satisfying both a social need and dietary need, while nomadic pastoralists cold drive their herds seasonally from one self-sustaining city to another, selling a portion of their animals for slaughter in return for goods that they could not produce given their nomadic way of life.
I cited the emergence (actually, the re-emergence) of urban agriculture and the demographic trend toward increasing urbanization as driving forces in the scenario of pastoralization. The idea of urban agriculture is also important in another macro-historical scenario, neo-agriculturalism. Pastoralization and neo-agriculturalism are only distinct by degrees, and many of the features of each may co-exist.
Two recent books make suggestive arguments that point toward the ongoing strategic trends of urbanization and urban agriculture, which, if they become the dominant strategic trends in the future, will issue in something like pastoralization or neo-agriculturalism. These two books are $20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better by Christopher Steiner and Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier by Edward Glaeser (which latter I wrote about in Cities: The Constructive Kluge).
Glaeser's book isn't "brilliant" (as some reviews said) nor is he a mere shill (as some reviews seem to suggest). It is probably sufficient to read the first and last chapters and skip the anecdote the fills most of the book; you can pick up most of his ideas this way and miss very little. Really, all you need to know is the full title, since the book is concerned to demonstrate the thesis that cities make us richer, smarter, greener, healthier, and happier. One need not agree with every aspect of this argument to still agree with many or most of them, and to see that a clear case can be made for urbanization.
In regard to thinking in terms of "making a case for urbanization" we are clearly thinking in political terms rather than historical terms, and this seems to be Glaeser's orientation. He is critical of policies that have had the unintended result of harming cities, and, since he thinks that cities are the best thing to come along in the human experience, harming cities is tantamount to engaging in self-harm. The limitations of thinking in terms of policy appear when we begin to think in terms of spans of time beyond that of a single human lifespan, and across which greater spans of time unintended consequences tend to swamp intended consequences. This is the difference between urbanization as a political idea and urbanization as an historical idea (conceived parallel to the distinction I made between globalization as a political idea and globalization as an historical idea).
If one is hesitant to fully subscribe to a rationally argued case for the city, there is, alternatively, the economic case for the city, and this is what Christopher Steiner argues in his book. He makes the case that steadily rising prices for gasoline will have far-reaching consequences for the structure of contemporary life, and these changes will have radical consequences for urban, suburban, and rural life. Although both Glaeser and Steiner argue that cities are environmentally and economically more sustainable than suburban, village, or rural life, Glaeser argues additionally that cities are a good thing; Steiner, on the contrary, argues that cities are the inevitable thing because they make more environmental economic sense. Again, this illustrates the difference between urbanism as political idea and urbanism as historical idea.
Steiner is at times almost apocalyptic in making his point, but, I think, justifiably so:
"There will be plenty of small towns that simply do not make the transition from a satellite living on cheap oil to a town that's half self-sustaining and populated by people who not only prefer a small town life, but also are stringently loyal to their small town and are willing to sacrifice for their neighbors, their town, and their way of life. The hamlets that don't survive, like the Wal-Marts who fall ahead of them, will be home only to ghosts, gusts, and a reclaiming Mother Nature."
Christopher Steiner, $20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better, 2010, p. 151
This is very close to what I wrote about pastoralization, although I would argue further that "reclaiming mother nature" would include those individuals who would also choose to return to Mother Nature rather than live the superfantastic urban life that Edward Glaeser praises (although does not live, since he admits in the book that he lives in the suburbs). Even while high gasoline costs could make the automobile obsolete, and that part of industrial-technical civilization based upon the automobile also obsolete, there will be other technologies (like electric cars) which can be substituted. One could also, however, substitute those robust and durable technologies that preceded the automobile. Horses could be grazed in the abandoned spaces imagined by Steiner, and used for transportation by those who opt out of urban concentrations.
One way to define the difference between my closely related scenarios of pastoralization and neo-agriculturalism is how the land freed by abandoned exurbs and rural depopulation will be put to use. If these lands are put to use in settled agriculture along a quasi-nineteenth century model, then the result will be neo-agriculturalism. If these lands are put to use (to the extent that they are "used" at all) for pastoralism, then we have the development of pastoralization. The neo-agricultural paradigm would likely converge upon (or, rather, return to) human societies exemplifying the agricultural macabre, while the pastoralization paradigm, with its mixture of extremely dense urbanism and nomadic pastoralism would produce a very different kind of society (or, rather, two societies), and it is difficult to say what this would be other than a unprecedented synthesis of urbanism and nomadism.
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A Further Note on Geopolitics and Biopolitics
6 February 2012
In Geopolitics and Biopolitics, and again in Addendum on Geopolitics and Biopolitics, I suggested that the struggle between the geopolitical perspective and the biopolitical perspective could be a significant constituent of the ideological struggles in the coming century and centuries.
In so saying, I could be interpreted as saying that one epoch of history marked by the nation-state and its theoretical expression in geopolitics is slowly beginning to yield its place to an incipient epoch of history that will, in the long term, be marked by the dissolution of the nation-state and the theoretical justification of this dissolution in biopolitics. Since this is one interpretation (inter alia), I want to address this immediately simply in order to say that this is not what I am saying when I explicitly contrast the geopolitical style of thought with the biopolitical style of thought.
I would not say that the age of the nation-state, and its implicit theoretical expression in geopolitics, constitutes a division of macro-history on the order or nomadism, agriculturalism, or industrialism. The institution of the nation-state emerges in the agricultural paradigm and is preserved in the transition to industrialism, and thus represents a continuity, much like the fact of settled life, which originates with agriculturalism and remains the norm under industrialism.
It would be entirely plausible to make the argument that the advent of the nation-state is a political event on the level of macro-history, and that we ought to name a new division of macro-history on the basis of this form of socio-political order. I would not myself make this argument, but certainly the argument could be made. The advent of the nation-state is important, but not, in my opinion, that important.
I assume that it is possible that a struggle between the geopolitical perspective and the biopolitical perspective could proceed even as the macro-historical division of industrialism is consolidated and the process of globalization brings industrial-technological civilization to the planet entire.
Moreover, the struggle between the geopolitical and the biopolitical could animate the development of any of the possible scenarios for future macro-historical divisions such as I have identified: singularization, pastoralization, extraterrestrialization, and, most recently, neo-agriculturalism. It could even be argued that the next future will develop as a result of this conflict, much as Marx thought that communism would develop as a result of class conflict.
It is not that I suppose that the geopolitical and the biopolitical perspectives are indifferent to any and all of these macro-historical outcomes — I seems to me that the geopolitical perspective would be most likely to lead to extraterrestrialization while the biopolitical perspective would most likely lead to pastoralization or neo-agriculturalism if it were to become the dominant mode of thought — but rather that the dialectic of geopolitics and biopolitics is the form of development that will issue in a novel macro-historical division, and it is a further question, beyond the mere fact of the dialectic, which mode of thought becomes (or remains) dominant.
In any of these long term scenarios for macro-history I don't think that the nation-state as we know it today will remain the central feature of political organization. Some form of political organization that is the successor to the nation-state system, and which evolves out of the nation-state system, is likely to prevail, but in the case of global, macro-historical developments, the geographically defined nation-state must give way to forms of political order less dependent upon geographical boundaries. It is not likely that the successor to the nation-state system will involve a complete dissolution of these boundaries, but rather a change in boundaries — their extension, extrapolation, or transformation.
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Agriculture and the Macabre
31 January 2012
A revaluation of agricultural civilization
In several posts I have made a tripartite distinction in human history between hunter-gatherer nomadism, agriculturalism, and industrialism. There is a sense, then, from the perspective of la longue duree, that the macro-historical division of agriculturalism constitutes the "middle ages" of human social development. Prior to agriculturalism, nothing like this settled way of life even existed; now, later, from the perspective of industrialized civilization, agriculture is an enormous industry that can feed seven billion people, but it is a demographically marginal activity that occupies only a small fragment of our species. During those "middle ages" of agriculturalism (comprising maybe fifteen thousand years of human society) the vast bulk of our species was engaged in agricultural production. The very small class of elites oversaw agricultural production and its distribution, and the small class of the career military class or the career priestly class facilitated the work of elites in overseeing agricultural production. This civilizational focus is perhaps unparalleled by any other macro-historical epoch of human social development (and I have elsewhere implicitly referred to this focus in Pure Agriculturalism).
The advent of agricultural civilization was simultaneously the advent of settled civilization, and the transition from agriculturalism to industrialism left the institution of settled civilization in place. Other continuities are also still in place, and many of these continuities from agriculturalism to industrialism are simply the result of the youth of industrial civilization. When industrial civilization is ten thousand years old — should it survive so long, which is not at all certain — I suspect that it will preserve far fewer traces of its agricultural past. For the present, however, we live in a milieu of agricultural institutions held over from the long macro-historical division of agriculturalism and emergent institutions of a still-inchoate industrialism.
The institutions of agricultural civilization are uniquely macabre, and it is worthwhile to inquiry as to how an entire class of civilizations (all the civilizations that belong within the macro-historical division of settled agriculturalism) could come to embody a particular (and, indeed, a peculiar) moral-aesthetic tenor. What do I mean by "macabre"? The online Merriam-Webster dictionary defines "macabre" as follows:
1: having death as a subject: comprising or including a personalized representation of death
2: dwelling on the gruesome
3: tending to produce horror in a beholder
All of the above characterize settled agricultural civilization, which has death as its subject, dwells upon the gruesome, and as a consequence tends to produce horror in the beholder.
The thousand years of medieval European society, which approximated pure agriculturalism perhaps more closely than many other agricultural civilizations (and which we might call a little bit of civilization in its pure form), stands as a monument to the macabre, especially after the experience of the Black Death (bubonic plague), which gave the culture of Europe a decidedly death-obsessed aspect still to be seen in graphically explicit painting and sculpture. But medieval Europe is not unique in this respect; all settled agricultural civilization, to a greater or a lesser extent, has a macabre element at its core. The Agricultural Apocalypse that I wrote about in my previous post constitutes a concrete expression of the horrors that agricultural civilization has inflicted upon itself. What makes agricultural civilization so horrific? What is the source of the macabre Weltanschauung of agriculturalism?
Both the lives of nomadic hunter-gatherers and the lives of settled agriculturalists are bound up with a daily experience of death: human beings must kill in order to live, and other living beings must die so that human beings can live. Occasionally a human being dies so that another species may live, and while this still happens in our own time when someone is eaten by a bear or a mountain lion, it happens much less often that the alternative, which explains why there are seven billion human beings on the planet while no other vertebrate predator comes close to these numbers. The only vertebrate species that flourish are those that we allow to flourish (there are, for example, about sixteen billion chickens in the world), with the exception of a few successful parasitic species such as rats and seagulls. (Even then, there are about five billion rats on the planet, and each rat weighs only a faction of the mass of a human being, so that total human biomass is disproportionately great.)
Although nomadic hunter-gatherers and settled agriculturalists both confront pervasive experiences of death, the experience of death is different in each case, and this difference in the experience and indeed in the practice of death informs everything about human life that is bound up in this relationship to death. John Stuart Mill wrote in his The Utility of Religion:
"Human existence is girt round with mystery: the narrow region of our experience is a small island in the midst of a boundless sea, which at once awes our feelings and stimulates our imagination by its vastness and its obscurity. To add to the mystery, the domain of our earthly existence is not only an island in infinite space, but also in infinite time. The past and the future are alike shrouded from us: we neither know the origin of anything which is, nor, its final destination. If we feel deeply interested in knowing that there are myriads of worlds at an immeasurable, and to our faculties inconceivable, distance from us in space; if we are eager to discover what little we can about these worlds, and when we cannot know what they are, can never satiate ourselves with speculating on what they may be; is it not a matter of far deeper interest to us to learn, or even to conjecture, from whence came this nearer world which we inhabit; what cause or agency made it what it is, and on what powers depend its future fate?"
While Mill wrote that human existence is girt round with mystery, he might well have said that human existence is girt round with death, and in many religious traditions death and mystery or synonymous. The response to the death that surrounds human existence, and the kind of death that surrounds human existence, shapes the mythological traditions of the people so girt round.
Joseph Campbell explicitly recognized the striking difference in mythologies between nomadic hunter-gatherers and settled agricultural peoples. This is a theme to which Campbell returns time and again in his books and lectures. The mythologies of hunting peoples, Campbell maintained, revolved around placating the spirits of killed prey, while the mythologies of agricultural peoples resolved around sacrifice, according to the formula that, since life grows out of death, in order to create more life, one must create more death. Hence sacrifice. Campbell clearly explains a link between the mythologies peculiar to macro-historically distinct peoples, but why should peoples respond so strongly (and so differently) to distinct experiences of death? And, perhaps as importantly, why should peoples respond mythologically to death? To answer this question demands a more fundamental perspective upon human life in its embeddedness in socio-cultural milieux, and we can find such a perspective in a psychoanalytic interpretation of history derived from Freud.
It is abundantly obvious, in observing the struggle for life, that organisms are possessed of a powerful instinct to preserve the life of the individual at all costs and to reproduce that life (sometimes called eros or libido), but Freud theorized that, in addition to the survival instinct that there is also a "death drive" (sometimes called thanatos). Here is Freud's account of the death drive:
"At one time or another, by some operation of force which still completely baffles conjecture, the properties of life were awakened in lifeless matter. Perhaps the process was a prototype resembling that other one which later in a certain stratum of living matter gave rise to consciousness. The tension then aroused in the previously inanimate matter strove to attain an equilibrium; the first instinct was present, that to return to lifelessness. The living substance at that time had death within easy reach; there was probably only a short course of life to run, the direction of which was determined by the chemical structure of the young organism. So through a long period of time the living substance may have been constantly created anew, and easily extinguished, until decisive external influences altered in such a way as to compel the still surviving substance to ever greater deviations from the original path of life, and to ever more complicated and circuitous routes to the attainment of the goal of death. These circuitous ways to death, faithfully retained by the conservative instincts, would be neither more nor less than the phenomena of life as we now know it. If the exclusively conservative nature of the instincts is accepted as true, it is impossible to arrive at any other suppositions with regard to the origin and goal of life."
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, authorized translation from the second German edition by C. J. M. Hubback, London and Vienna: The International Psycho-Analytical Press, 1922, pp. 47-48
The death drive, or thanatos, does not appear to be as urgent as the drive to live and to reproduce, but according to Freud it is equally implicated in society and culture. Moreover, given the emergence of war from the same settled agricultural societies that practiced a mythology of sacrifice (according to Campbell), there has been a further "production" of death by the social organization made possible by settled societies. It is to be expected that the production of death by sacrifice in order to ensure a good harvest would become entangled with the production of death in order to ensure the continuity of the community, and indeed in societies in which war became highly ritualized (e.g., Aztec civilization and Japanese civilization) there is a strong element of sacrifice in combat.
Freud's explanation of the death drive may strike the reader as a bit odd and perhaps unlikely, but the mechanism that Freud is proposing is not all that different from Sartre's contention that being-for-itself seeks to become being-in-itself (to put it simply, everyone wants to be God): life — finite life, human life — is problematic, unstable, uncertain, subject to calamity, and pregnant with every kind of danger. Why would such a contingent, finite being not desire to possess the quiescence and security of being-in-itself, to be free of all contingencies, which Shakespeare called all the ills that flesh is heir to? The mythologies that Campbell describes as being intrinsic to nomadic and settled peoples are mechanisms that attempt to restore the equilibrium to the world that has been disturbed by human activity.
Agricultural civilization is the institutionalization of the death drive. The mythology of sacrifice institutionalizes death as the norm and even the ideal of agricultural civilizations. As such, settled agricultural civilization is (has been) a pathological permutation of human society that has resulted in the social equivalent of neurotic misery. That is to say, agricultural civilization is a civilization of neurotic misery, but all civilization need not be neurotically miserable. The Industrial Revolution has accomplished part of the world of overcoming the institutions of settled agriculturalism, but we still retain much of its legacy. To make the complete transition from the neurotic misery of settled agricultural civilization to ordinary civilizational unhappiness will require an additional effort above and beyond industrialization.
Despite the explicit recognition of a Paleolithic Golden Age prior to settled agriculturalism, there is a strong bias in contemporary civilization against nomadism and in favor of settled civilization. Both Kenneth Clark's Civilisation: A Personal View and Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man (both of which I have cited with approval in many posts) make broad evaluative judgments to the detriment of nomadic societies — an entirely superfluous judgment, as though the representatives of settled civilization felt that they needed to defend an existential orientation of their civilization by condemning the way of life of uncivilized peoples, who are called savages and barbarians. The contempt that has been shown for the world's surviving nomadic peoples — the Sami, the Gypsies, and others — as well as programs of forced sedentarization — e.g., among the Kyrgyz — show the high level of emotional feeling that still attaches to the difference between fundamentally distinct forms of life, even when one pattern of life has become disproporationately successful and no longer needs to defend itself against the depredations of the other.
Given this low esteem in which existential alternatives are held, it is important to see settled agricultural civilization, as well as its direct descendent, settled industrial civilization, in their true colors and true dimensions, and to explicitly recognize the pathological and explicitly macabre elements of the civilization that we have called our own in order to see it for what it is and therefore to see its overcoming as an historical achievement for the good the species.
We are not yet free of the institutions of settled agricultural civilization, which means that we are not yet free of a Weltanschauung constructed around macabre rituals focused on death. And despite the far-reaching changes to life that have come with the Industrial Revolution, there is no certainly that the developments that separate us from the settled agricultural macabre will continue. I wrote above that, given the consolidation of industrial civilization, we will probably have institutions far less agricultural in character, but it remains possible that the industrialism may falter, may collapse, or may even, after consolidating itself as a macro-historical division, give way to a future macro-historical division in which the old ways of agriculturalism will be reasserted.
I count among the alternatives of future macro-historical developments the possibility of pastoralization and neo-agriculturalism. In any civilization largely constituted by either the historical processes of pastoralization of neo-agriculturalism, agriculture would once again play a central and perhaps a dominant role in the life of the people. In a future macro-historical division in which agriculture was once again the dominant feature of human experience, I would expect that the macabre character of agricultural civilization would once against reassert itself in a new mythology eventually consolidated in the axialization of a future historical paradigm centered on agriculture.
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subset: commoncrawl


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Unisa's College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences (CAES) undertook a critical mission to advance internationalisation through strategic collaborations and partnerships in the Republic of Kenya, bearing prospects to further expand to neighbouring countries.
Supported by colleagues from the Strategic Partnerships unit, CAES met with appraised institutions in Kenya. Engagements were held with the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT), the University of Nairobi (UON), Kenyatta University (KU), Egerton University and Baraton College, a sister college to Egerton University (EU).
Essentially, the visit focused on, among others, exploring opportunities for internationalisation prospects such as joint degrees, co-supervision, mobility, and co-publishing; opportunities to create awareness and share insights on open, distance, and e-learning (ODeL) teaching, learning, and research in the sciences; advance and broaden scope for collaborative research, and expand the Unisa Animal Health programme. It was a mission with a distinct intention to bring back timetables and implementation plans.
Four agreements were concluded, covering various potential areas of collaboration, including the above-mentioned areas. The engagements also identified and concretised priority areas of collaboration with time lines. Some of the priority areas cut across Unisa colleges, thus opening prospects for interactive collaborations across the university and beyond CAES.
Furthermore, the mission took time to engage the Kenya Veterinary Board, as the national custodian responsible for registration and regulation of veterinary affairs in Kenya. This strategic engagement aimed to create awareness and facilitate implementation of Unisa collaboration in the country. The visit was one of the successful missions of 2018 and carved an everlasting impression about Unisa in the Eastern Region of Africa, as an ODeL academic and research institution. This impression was reaffirmed by the recent visit to Unisa by a delegation from the Kenya Council for Higher Education (equivalent of CHE).
You can read more about the visit here.
*By Kelebogile Moruane and Siza Magubane
Publish date: 2018-12-10 00:00:00.0


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Samsung NX2000 Camera Firmware Update 1.14
User Drivers » Digital Camera » Samsung »
Date Added: May 01, 2014 / Release Date: April 27, 2014 / Publisher: Samsung / File Size: 242.87 MB
OS: All OS
Change history v1.14:
- Adding Shunt down Action option of Sensor Cleaning.
- Adding DMF Responsiveness option (support lens 18-55mm-III, 16-50mm).
- 16-50mm S and Power zoom lens compatability:
- Improved AF performance and color shading.
- Power zoom lens, zoom speed changing option.
- Power zoom lens, movie recording touch-zoom function option.
- Power zoom lens, display focal-length option.
[Caution] During upgrading firmware, a camera turns itself on and off 3 times.Do not cut off the power and Do not remove battery before complete message.
Recent Drivers
Samsung NX Mini Camera Firmware Update 01.03
Samsung NX2000 Camera Firmware Update 1.14
Samsung Lens Firmware Upgrade File Ver 140311
Samsung NX30 Camera Firmware Upgrade 1.10
Samsung NX300 Camera Firmware Update 1.40


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rod permalink19/03/2009 4:44 am
wow! very inspiring post! 🙂 the hardest part here is consistency.
i too had a weight problem before.
although i'm not yet on my ideal weight yet, but i'm getting there.
i'm a happy feet (impromptu_runners) member too. hope to see you in future runs!
Hi Rod, Thanks for droppin by. I wish you well on your weight loss 🙂 I know you can do it. I see you in the thread. Hope to run soon, once again with the group! keep on running!
19/03/2009 5:11 am
what a transformation. from fat girl to thin woman. but i know its really hard to keep the weight down eating feels so good.
take care of yourself
haha, its funny isnt it Pat? Good luck on your event, Condura Run on Sunday, I know it will be a success!!
19/03/2009 5:47 am
Can't imagine you as someone with so much weight …
But you're doing well as a runner. More power, Chaia!
Hi Roselle!hehe 🙂 I can't imagine myself i gained and lost so much. Thanks Roselle! Again, good luck on your Half mara this Sunday!


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This webmap generously sponsored by ND Landscape
58 acres. A mix of mature hardwood woodlands and open fields that border the Ipswich River.
ECTA Map:
For ECTA Webmap Sponsorship, click here.
Click here to download the full-size pdf version of the Julia Bird Reservation map.
- Walking
- Birding
- XC-Skiing
- Snowshoeing
- Horseback Riding
- Fishing
- Canoeing
Wildlife sightings have included coyote, beaver, and pileated woodpeckers. Trails in woods can be muddy during wet times, but fields are generally dry.
From the intersection of Bay Road (Rte 1A) and Waldingfield Road in Ipswich, drive down Waldingfield Road, over a railroad bridge and parking is on the right. There is a Greenbelt sign at the trailhead.
Essex County Greenbelt Association
82 Eastern Avenue Essex, MA 01929
ph: (978) 768 – 7241
fax: (978) 768-3286
email: email@example.com
Website: http://www.ecga.org/properties/juliabird.html


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Better off at home? Effects of a nursing home admission on costs, hospitalizations and survival.
Aging-in-place policies substitute home care for nursing home admissions (NHA). They appear to be a win-win by keeping public spending in check and being in line with personal preferences, but have hitherto not been evaluated. We study the impact of NHA eligibility using Dutch administrative data and exploiting variation between randomly assigned assessors in their tendency to grant admission. The impact on mortality is zero, but with considerable effect heterogeneity. Moreover, aging-in-place policies come at the cost of increased curative care, especially hospital admissions, and do not reduce total healthcare spending, suggesting they may not be a win-win after all.
|Additional Metadata
|long-term care, policy evaluation, instrumental variables
|Health: General (jel I10)
|Persistent URL
Bakx, P., Wouterse, B, van Doorslaer, E.K.A, & Wong, A. (2018). Better off at home? Effects of a nursing home admission on costs, hospitalizations and survival.. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/1765/115876


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About Mary Ellen Copeland, Ph.D.
- Subscribe to this author's RSS Feed
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Articles by Mary Ellen Copeland, Ph.D.:
Components of Recovery
Using Advocacy as a Self-Help Tool
Building and Keeping a Circle of Friends
How Do You Know When You're Recovered?
Coping with My Mom's Mental Illness
Five Steps for Dealing with Trauma
Are You Lonely?
Depressed? What Do You Do Now?
Taking Back Control of Your Life
Why Suicide is Not a Good Idea
Starting an Exercise Program: The Right Time Is Now
Joining a Support Group
Enjoying the Winter Holiday Season
Developing a Wellness Toolbox
Coming Out of the Mire
Being the Expert on Yourself
Tips for Building Self-Esteem


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DIAGNOdent® Cavity Detection− Tulare, CA
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Fashion that no distraction would have kept Lebron from adulation.
A version we need when lacking competition.
How can passion still be found in a totally different profession?
Eradication of the basic computation of old thoughts and distractions.
Pushing complication is a reputation built on repetition.
A contradiction of expression is it's definition.
Can an organization understand a translation of this exhibition?
Not allocation, centralization, but a collaboration and realization
That passion is combination of communication, commotion, connections, and celebrations
The operation to creation of imagination and pushing with ambition.
The attraction to correction and a solution to a problem or situation.
A revolution or more a position to mission and vision that is not fiction.
Not to be a statistician, technician, or a politician and leaving a bad impression.
The passion of a magician and a confession to depression.
Leaving you with the impression of a possession for education.
Beyond comprehension, we've had that discussion.
Intervention of the construction of your lesson.
A mention of my intention to devotion and dedication to my position.
Hollow ground is a school's composition and constitution.
Relation and friction go hand in hand with emotion and tension.
All of this provides me a passion, the opposite of demolition.
Construction, a reproduction with daily intention.
No need for permission to live and work with passion.


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You are never too old to start a new career thanks to a Network Rail apprenticeship and the organisation is now recruiting.
Network Rail has six vacancies in Peterborough for would-be apprentices and welcomes applications from school leavers to those looking to switch career.
The award-winning scheme offers opportunities in many different disciplines such as signalling, telecoms and track, as well as exciting new opportunities in cyber security and digital railway as it seeks to recruit and train people in the skills needed to meet the changing face of a modern railway.
As well as the Advanced Apprenticeship Scheme, Network Rail is also set to increase the number and range of business apprenticeships that it offers. In addition to the rail technician apprenticeships, the company offers apprenticeships in corporate functions such as accounting, HR, project management and commercial surveying all leading to professional qualifications.
One person that is reaping the benefits of Network Rail's Advanced Apprenticeship Scheme is Hudson Keen, who is in his second year of a three year rail technician apprenticeship.
Hudson, 21, from Peterborough, chose the Network Rail apprentice route after A' levels, as he wanted an alternative to university. For the first five months of the scheme, he was on a residential training course in Coventry before joining a depot. He now gets on-the-job training which is complemented by regular theoretical input every two to three weeks.
He said: "The Network Rail Apprentice scheme is a fantastic opportunity. It's the start of your career, where you can learn a huge amount and make friends for life. I like the variety of the work and having the opportunity to learn at some fantastic training facilities. Network Rail is a great employer who looks after you at every stage of your career, even from your application.
"People should apply for this apprenticeship if they want a lifelong career with a massive range of opportunities throughout the country. The company cares for you and provides great benefits, such as their excellent pension scheme. The training, including hands on practical work, is of a high standard, and you will always have the chance to learn more. I would recommend the scheme to everyone."
For further information or to apply, go to www.networkrail.co.uk/apprentices. The deadline for applications is 11 December 2018.


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Funeral Program Templates for Complete Customization
There are several different names for funeral programs. They may be referred to as a funeral bulletin, funeral memorial programs, funeral service programs, or memorial service programs.
Whatever the term, the meaning is the same. A funeral program usually contains the order of the events of a funeral service. The pallbearers' names are listed, special poems or verses are included, and anything else client families wish to include to help celebrate the life of their loved one.
Personalizing Funeral Programs
Client families look to their funeral director for funeral personalization options. They wish to honor the life of their loved one throughout the service with attention to every detail.
In addition to including the order of service to advise mourners of the schedule of events during the funeral service, a funeral program can be utilized to further memorialize the family's loved one. Some things that can be suggested to the family to include in a funeral program for maximum customization are:
Photographs: The cover of most funeral programs will contain a photograph of the deceased. Whether the family wishes to include a picture of their loved one in younger years or one that reflects how the deceased looked recently — the option is theirs.
Readings: During the funeral service, certain family and friends may have been selected to read a scripture reading or a poem. In the funeral program, the name of the individual to perform the reading can be mentioned.
Funeral Poems and Scripture: Another option client families can choose to include in the funeral service program are funeral poems or scripture. Perhaps there was a particular poem that was special to the deceased? Some families may choose a famous poem to include in the funeral program that speaks to their feelings. For example, Ecclesiastics 3:1-8, Canon Henry Scott Hollands's "Death is Nothing At All," or — a personal favorite — Mary Elizabeth Frye's "I Did Not Die." If there is space inside the program, they can be included there; otherwise, the back cover can be used.
Pallbearers: Typically, the back cover of the funeral service program is reserved for any messages from the family to other mourners, such as one that thanks them for their attendance. Additionally, the names of the pallbearers are usually listed there as well. Other options would be to include a short biography of the deceased.
Funeral Home Software for Personalization
With the invention of funeral software, funeral program templates allow a funeral director to choose from an online library of hundreds of background layouts. Once selected, these layouts can be used for other funeral stationery items as well so that the entire service and keepsakes are well-coordinated.
The flexibility of these funeral program templates enables the funeral director to not only easily customize and print them in-house, it also enables the family to receive a completely customized funeral program for their loved one's life celebration.
Download Tribute Center for free to create funeral programs and other funeral stationery products for the families you serve!


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Lionel Walsh • My Life and Times
20 March 2010
"There was generosity in the air that day"
Michael Reupke
I saw Lionel at a loss for what to say or do only once in the many years and many situations I had seen him over many years. It was about 1969 in Bonn. Lionel was at a typewriter, We had nice big standard machines in Bonn in those days. Lionel was typing the nightlead, that is the wrapup of all the days developments in the story of that day, I cannot remember the story. Lionel had between his lips a cigarette. Lionel smoked a lot in those days, I mean a lot.
A generous colleague offered him a fresh cigarette. Lionel took it and lit it, as was his wont, from the cigarette between his lips. He held the freshly lit cigarette in his right hand and continued typing. He was very skilled at this. Another benefactor proffered him a packet, from which he drew a fresh cigarette with his left hand. He lit it in the accustomed manner and carried on typing, now with a lit cigarette in each hand and one between his lips, quite a feat you must admit.
There was no shortage of generosity in the air that day (I think it must have been a Friday afternoon) and Lionel was offered yet another cigarette, which he gratefully accepted and lit in the usual way. He visibly wondered whether to put that one between his lips or behind his right ear. We were all relieved when a fellow smoker also noticed his plight and relieved Lionel of the supernumerary fag!
Needless to say the nightlead went out on time as ever!
"Without delay or shillyshallying..."
Donald Armour
Lionel, although very busy as bureau chief, took me on his Bonn staff in 1966 with little training or experience and showed great patience, spent much time, teaching me the business of journalism. I have never forgotten his guidance, advice and sometimes very telling tips throughout my entire career. In addition to the professional skills he passed on to me, Lionel also taught me the value of getting things done smartly, without delay or shillyshallying. Hitherto I had led a very leisurely existence. Altogether I remember my time under his leadership and tutelage in Bonn as part of the salad days of youth. Lionel showed great patience with me and I am eternally grateful to him. May I offer him my very best wishes on his eightieth birthday.
See extracts of speeches and tributes from Michael Walsh, Mohsin Ali, Randy Holden
Return to the 80th birthday page
Care to make a comment? Send an email
Copyright © 2010 Lionel Walsh


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Charlize Theron is kicking ass in movies theaters as of today!
Get Ready For Some Serious Ass-Kicking – Courtesy Of Charlize Theron!
There is a new film coming out this summer that lets Charlize Theron fight with the big boys – and win!
First, check out the trailer for "Atomic Blonde!"
"Atomic Blonde" is a spy thriller directed by David Leitch. It's based on Antony Johnston's 2012 graphic novel "The Coldest City" – all about a spy, Charlize Theron, who has to find a list of double agents who are being smuggled into the West.
The film stars Charlize Theron, along with James McAvoy and John Goodman. As you saw from the trailer, Charlize really kicks into high action mode in the film – and there's a good reason why!
Director David Leitch co-directed the first "John Wick" with Chad Stahelski – a terrific action film that also worked because it allowed star Keanu Reeves to do lots of action sequences!
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text: I am working with Windows storage clusters, and I am wanting to monitor disk I/O for the cluster object. The issue I'm running into is that if monitoring using WMI Logical Disk I/O BETA or Windows Physical Disk I/O BETA, I run into the issue of the disk disappearing on the cluster object and alerting down. I'd like to be able to keep a solid monitor on the disk that the CSV lives on regardless of which node the cluster service is currently running on. Is there a performance monitor that I am missing that can accomplish this?


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Downloadable Workouts!
Finger & Foot Fitness (71 Min) Download
$ 19.95
Finger & Foot Fitness is a Master Level Educational Clinic filmed at a Safety Harbor Fitness Retreat which educates and demonstrates several movements for fingers and feet to help improve flexibility, lessen pain and decrease inflammation.
Maintaining optimal function of fingers and feet is not only important for lymphatic function but also help your body lose weight easier and get fit faster.
Finger and Foot Fitness workout – 71 minutes


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Modern BI & Mobile BI for Business Users!
Mobile BI and Personalized Dashboards: Important Components of Modern BI! If your team is using business intelligence (and it should be), you may be working with a more restrictive business solution that is not designed for a business user. If that is the case, you are missing an opportunity to cascade analytics throughout the organization and to optimize your resources and improve productivity. Self-Serve Business Intelligence solutions are designed with guidance and recommendations to guide a business user with average skills through the process of preparing and analyzing data and to encourage collaboration and data sharing across the enterprise. ###Details >
Assisted Predictive Modeling, Augmented Analytics, Citizen Data Scientists, Mobile BI, Modern BI, Self-Serve Data Preparation, Smart Data Visualisation
Easy, Mobile, Out-of-the-Box BI Tools!
Design Once, Use Anywhere for Out-of-the-Box Mobile BI on All Devices! So, you want to use a business intelligence solution but you don't want to have to customize, spend a lot of money and end up with a solution that is restrictive and does not meet your needs? I don't blame you.###Details >
BI Tools, Business Intelligence Solution, Mobile BI, Mobile BI Tools, Mobile Business Intelligence Solution, Self Serve Business Intelligence
Do I Really Need a Mobile BI Solution?
Does My BI Solution Need to be Mobile? How can any business today be willing to accept a BI solution that has little or no mobile capability? Not only do most businesses have staff members on the road, but most businesses have staff members who work from home at least part of the time or those who extend their working hours outside the office.###Details >
Business Intelligence Tools, Mobile BI, Mobile BI Software, Mobile BI Tools, Mobile Business Intelligence, Modern BI
Mobile BI Software for All Devices!
Does My Team Need Mobile Business Intelligence Tools? One of the critical factors in BI tools consideration is whether those tools are easily used on mobile devices. Mobile business intelligence tools are crucial to the success of a business intelligence project. Businesses may spend considerable time and effort on data democratization and on providing tools for team members to use in data analysis but if those tools are not mobile, if they are inaccessible to those on the road, out of the office or working from home, business users do not have equal access or adequate tools to perform day-to-day analytics, to share data with other users or to prepare reports or presentations.###Details >
Mobile Business Intelligence is Your Secret Weapon
Why is Mobile Business Intelligence Important? If it is to be useful in business, business intelligence must be accessible from within the walls of the business and outside the business. Tablets, smart phones and desktops are all tools that serve your business users every day. Because our society is mobile and because our users are also consumers and expect their business tools to be easy-to-use and intuitive just like the consumer applications they use every day. Mobile business intelligence is not just nice to have, it is crucial in today's competitive business environment.###Details >
Mobile BI, Mobile BI and Analytics, Mobile BI Dashboard, Mobile BI Reporting, Mobile BI Solution, Mobile BI Tool, Mobile Business Intelligence, Mobile Business Intelligence and Analytics, Mobile Business Intelligence Dashboards, Mobile Business Intelligence Reporting, Mobile Business Intelligence Software, Mobile Business Intelligence Solutions, Mobile Business Intelligence Tools
Mobile BI: Designed for EVERY Device
Mobile BI That is Designed for Every Device, Every user, Every Environment! Design is important! Design skills are used in many industries; everything from appliances and cars to clothing and software interface design. The overall design, the layout, the detail…it is all important. People want to use products that work in many environments. Think about it! It wouldn't make sense to design a car that was suitable only for people with short legs!###Details >
Mobile BI, Mobile BI and Analytics, Mobile BI India, Mobile BI Reporting, Mobile Business Intelligence, Mobile Business Intelligence Dashboards, Mobile Business Intelligence Software, Mobile Business Intelligence Solutions, Mobile Business Intelligence Tools
Get Business Intelligence that Suits Business Users
All Business Intelligence Solutions are Not Alike! There is a lot to business intelligence and it is easy to get lost in the details but, if you want to promote a self-serve BI environment for your users, you will want to have a good understanding of your product options. Look for a solution that offers key performance indicator analytics, with an easy-to-personalize KPI dashboard. Look for business intelligence reporting tools that allow for drill down, drill through, and produce attractive, clear, concise reports that can be easily shared and that are accessible on mobile devices with diverse sizes and screen resolution.###Details >
Advanced Analytics India, BI Tools and Solutions, Business Intelligence India, Business Intelligence Software, Business Intelligence Tools, Citizen Data Scientists, Mobile BI
Mobile BI Tools with Great ROI and TCO: Fast and Easy
Mobile BI Tools with Great ROI and TCO? Yes! You CAN Have it All! I know many of you balk at the idea of upgrading or acquiring BI tools. The benefits of business intelligence software are well known but organizations are often discouraged by what they perceive as the high cost and long implementation time required to complete the project.###Details >
Mobile BI, Mobile BI Software, Mobile BI Tools, Mobile Business Intelligence, Mobile Business Intelligence Software, Mobile Business Intelligence Tools, ReImagine Business Intelligence
Discover the Advantages of Mobile BI Business Intelligence Software
Every business is mobile these days! Whether you have a large, medium or small business or you are a sole proprietor working in a home office, you are on the go and you need business intelligence tools that provide mobile BI dashboards and advanced data discovery and analytics to support your business decision, identify issues and opportunities and keep your business moving in the right direction. In the past, BI tools were difficult to use and limited or restricted to access within the office or by certain individuals in the organization. You need ready to use, out of the box business intelligence, without restrictive licensing.###Details >
Business Intelligence Software, Business Intelligence Tools, Mobile BI, Mobile BI Dashboards, reimagine BI
A Business Intelligence Tool Must be a MOBILE Business Intelligence Tool!
A business intelligence tool is only valuable if it is accessible and In today's mobile world, a mobile business intelligence tool is a necessity. Business users are now empowered with data democratization and social BI is more popular than ever. But, all of that is out of reach if your tools are not mobile.###Details >
Advanced Analytics, Business Intelligence Software, Business Intelligence Tools, Mobile BI, Mobile Business Intelligence
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Artists in schools programs enable students and teachers to interact and learn from the professional arts community.
Schools have the option of organising incursions, in which the artist visits the school, or excursions, in which students and staff visit the artists outside of school grounds. There are advantages to both options.
An artist-in-residence allows an artist to carry out creative work at a school over a period of time. The artist works closely with students and the classroom teacher, using their own work, ideas and skills as the catalysts for students' own creative explorations.
AiR case studies
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Visiting Artists - Incursions
Artists can visit schools for a project lasting a few hours or a full day to present performances, demonstrations, workshops or master classes. These are more likely to be projects on a one-off basis than as a continuous program. While the connection that the artists can make with students in this time is limited, these events are less time-consuming to organise than a residency, and can be easier to accommodate within a busy school timetable.
Adequate project development and planning is still required; read more
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What is a teaching artist? Find out more
Home page image: Churchlands Primary School student artwork. AIR Grants Program project 2012, artists in residence Paula Hart, Sohan Ariel Hayes and Monica Main.


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Mobile Hotspots Available for Check Out at Security Public Library
Last updated 10/2/2019 at 3:58pm
Mobile Hotspots are now available for checkout at the Security Public Library.
The hotspot program allows library card holders to access unlimited, high-speed Internet service anywhere a Sprint signal can be received. Persons can connect up to 10 devices at a time, including desktops, laptops, tablet, smartphones, etc.
"It's perfect for those who have no Internet access at home, are going on a vacation, or taking their business on the road," a spokesperson said.
For questions or to reserve a Mobile Hotspot, call 391-3196....
For access to this article please sign in or subscribe.


text: Listings >> Massage Therapy Gulf Coast Wellness & Massage Therapy (813) 780-2242 massagezephyrhills.com Write a review Review Relax and find relief through the power of massage Find relief from aches and pains and get back to your active lifestyle with the help of our professional massage therapist. Stop by or give us a call to schedule your appointment. Rate and write a review Cancel replyYour email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *Your Review Name * Email * Website Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Your overall rating of this listing: Title of your review: Is this your business? Claim it now!Make sure your information is up to date. Marx Avenue 40916 Zephyrhills 33540 FL US Get directions Massage Therapy Photo gallery All photos (4) Is this your business? Claim it now!Make sure your information is up to date.


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Difference between revisions of "PSWEpisode637"
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#[https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/01/wawa-breach-may-have-compromised-more-than-30-million-payment-cards/ Wawa Breach May Have Compromised More Than 30 Million Payment Cards] Nothing to see here...just PCI related
#[https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/01/wawa-breach-may-have-compromised-more-than-30-million-payment-cards/ Wawa Breach May Have Compromised More Than 30 Million Payment Cards] Nothing to see here...just PCI related
#[https://www.darkreading.com/threat-intelligence/united-nations-data-breach-started-with-microsoft-sharepoint-bug/d/d-id/1336926 United Nations Data Breach Started with Microsoft SharePoint Bug]
#[https://www.darkreading.com/threat-intelligence/united-nations-data-breach-started-with-microsoft-sharepoint-bug/d/d-id/1336926 United Nations Data Breach Started with Microsoft SharePoint Bug]
== Lee's Stories ==
== Lee's Stories ==
Revision as of 20:01, 30 January 2020
Recorded January 30, 2020 at G-Unit Studios in Rhode Island!
Episode Audio
- Join us at InfoSecWorld 2020 - March 30 - April 1, 2020 at the Disney Contemporary Resort! Security Weekly listeners save 15% off the InfoSec World Main Conference or World Pass! Visit securityweekly.com/ISW2020, click the register button to register with our discount code or the schedule button to sponsor a micro-interview!
- OSHEAN and the Pell Center are partnering together to present Cybersecurity Exchange Day on Wednesday, March 18th from 9am-3pm at Salve Regina University in the beautiful Newport, RI! Visit securityweekly.com/OSHEAN2020 to register for free and come join in the fun!
- We have officially migrated our mailing list to a new platform! Sign up for the list to receive invites to our virtual trainings, webcasts, and other content relative to your interests by visiting securityweekly.com/subscribe and clicking the button to join the list! You can also submit your suggestions for guests by going to securityweekly.com/guests and submitting the form! We'll review them monthly and reach out if they are a good fit!
- Our first-ever virtual training is happening on March 19th @11:00am ET, with Adam Kehler & Rob Harvey from Online Business Systems Risk, Security & Privacy Team. In this training you will learn how to generate a complex SHA-256 hashed password and then use password cracking tools to break it. Register for our upcoming trainings by visiting securityweekly.com, selecting the webcast/training drop down from the top menu bar and clicking registration.
Interview: Gene Kim, IT Revolution - 6:00-6:45PM
Gene Kim is a multiple award-winning CTO, researcher and author, and has been studying high-performing technology organizations since 1999. He was founder and CTO of Tripwire for 13 years. He has written six books, including The Unicorn Project (2019), The Phoenix Project (2013), The DevOps Handbook (2016), the Shingo Publication Award winning Accelerate (2018), and The Visible Ops Handbook (2004-2006) series. Since 2014, he has been the founder and organizer of DevOps Enterprise Summit, studying the technology transformations of large, complex organizations.
Segment Topic:
The Unicorn Project and The Five Ideals
Segment Description:
I'll share with you my goals and aspirations for The Unicorn Project, describe in detail the Five Ideals, along with my favorite case studies of both ideal and non-ideal, and why I believe more than ever that DevOps will be one of the most potent economic forces for decades to come.
Tech Segment: Peter Smith, Edgewise - 6:45PM-7:30PM
Peter Smith, Edgewise Founder and CEO, is a serial entrepreneur who built and deployed Harvard University's first NAC system before it became a security category. Peter brings a security practitioner's perspective to Edgewise with more than ten years of expertise as an infrastructure and security architect of data centers and customer-hosting environments for Harvard University, Endeca Technologies (Oracle), American Express, Fidelity UK, Bank of America, and Nike.
Segment Topic:
Stopping Python Backdoor Attacks
Segment Description:
The recent MechaFlounder was a backdoor attack linked to Iranian threat actors who targeted Turkish entities. Similar Python-based backdoor attacks have managed to evade traditional network security defenses and propagate inside their target environments.
- Why network address-based defenses alone cannot prevent attack propagation and lateral movement
- Why protection based on software-identity verification (zero trust security) can stop such attacks
- How Purple teams can collaborate more effectively with a shared visualization and understanding of application topology and attack pathways to targets
Security News - 7:30-8:30PM
Paul's Stories
- Kali Linux 2020.1 released: New tools, Kali NetHunter rootless, and more! - Help Net Security
- How to better control access to your Windows network
- Coronavirus claims new victim: 'DEF CON cancelled' joke cancelled after DEF CON China actually cancelled
- Rings selling my email address to spammers? Thats the least of its problems
- Wawa card breach: 30 million card records for sale in the dark web
- 97% of airports showing signs of weak cybersecurity
- Enterprise Hardware Still Vulnerable to Memory Lane Attacks
- Check Point detailed two flaws in Microsoft Azure that could have allowed taking over cloud servers
- Securing Containers with Zero Trust
Larry's Stories
Jeff's Stories
- Wawa Breach May Have Compromised More Than 30 Million Payment Cards Nothing to see here...just PCI related
- United Nations Data Breach Started with Microsoft SharePoint Bug
- Mega Breach Exposes More Than 250 Million
- Data breaches soared by 17% in 2019: 'We also saw the rise of a significant new threat'
Lee's Stories
- NHS alerted to severe vulnerabilities in GE Health Equipment CISA and CyberMDX release notices called "MDHex" - include SSH and SMB abuse as well as Windows XP components.
- Cisco fixes Critical Flaw in network management platform Cisco releases fix for "Firepower Management Center" to resolve CVE-2019-16028 which allows attackers to achieve admin on affected devices.
- Russian pleads guilty to running "CardPLanet" to sell Stolen Credit Cards CardPlanet web site sold cards for $2.50-$10. ~150,000 cards sold for about $20,000,000.
- Ragnarok Ransomware targets Citrix ADC, disables Windows Defender New ransomware dubbed Ragnarok targets unpatched Cisco AVS servers vulnerable to CVE-2019-1978.
- OurMine hackers attack and takeover NFL twitter accounts OurMine group is hacking NFL twitter accounts to prove they're back and everything is hackable. Hacked accounts properly secured _AFTER_ notification of the hack...
- Critical Bug: OpenBSD OpenSMTP bug allows RCE In the default configuraiton, a technique inspired by the Morris worm executes sendmail body as script. Patch released.
- Suspected Magecart hackers arrested in Indonesia Magecart "web skimmer" techniques used to target card-not-present data. Multi-agency task force shuts down C&C servers as part of Operation Night Fury.
- Wawa breach data found for sale Wawa breach data, affecting as many as 30 million found for sale on the Joker's Stash dark web site.
Tyler's Stories


text: María José García and Enrique Zepeda, permanent residents of Mexico, desired a second home in Salinas, Spain, that would be a European base for their frequent travels, as well as a guesthouse for family members and visitors. This tall order needed to be achieved in just 750 square feet of overall living space. Designing with these multiple functions in mind, Madrid-based PKMN architectures orchestrated a complete overhaul that would introduce flexibility and impermanence as central design principles. Transforming a choppy and dated flat, most of the new internal walls and partitions rotate effortlessly to meet different needs. Depending on the configuration, the home can be used as a two bedroom, one bedroom, or open studio space for parties or gatherings. The overall result, says PKMN's David Pérez, is a home with "not one centimeter of space that cannot be lived to the maximum."


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About Us
Oak Lane is a plastic free store and was established to help tackle the very serious and frightening plastic crisis our earth is facing. When you hear and read the figures concerning the amount of plastic used it seems an impossible situation to tackle as individuals. However, we must take action, we cannot wait for governments and large corporations to change their policies and practices, future generations need us to act now.
Oak Lane plastic free store will stock plastic free everyday items, such as toothbrushes, shampoos and cotton buds. Such products are used by all and by transitioning to the plastic free alternatives we can make a huge positive effect to our environment. We will offer alternatives to single use plastics and zero plastic will be used in our packaging. All our beauty products are and will be natural too, so no nasty chemicals being put on to your body.
This zero waste journey is new for us and we hope we can learn from each other ways to lead a more eco friendly life. Please join us on this plastic free journey!