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Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Muslims Crossed Pyrenees?
Had Muslims crossed Pyrenees?
What if the Muslim armies hadn't been stopped at the French border?
by Joan Acocella February 4, 2008
The New Yorker
Detail of Carl von Steuben's depiction of the Battle of Poitiers, fought in 732, the year Muslim armies crossed the Pyrenees.
Mike Ghouse comments :: A few corrections are warranted; At the very end of the first paragraph it reads "Their word was now superseded by Muhammad's, as their creeds were supplanted by this new one, Islam.". The word is not superseded, but progressed or enhanced.
In the Middle of the second paragraph it reads "Muhammad ordered the destruction of the three hundred and sixty idols around the city's great temple," the word destruction should be substituted by "removal".
Third paragraph, "and includes such things as the moon splitting in two should be asked to conform to post-Enlightenment thought." - Jesus walking on the water, Moses cutting through the red sea, Rama flying in special spatial vehicle all sound impossible. They are all based on faiths and all religions have that element as a part of building faith in the impossible, as building faith in the invisible God.
Lewis, David Levering;
"God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570 to 1215" (Norton; $29.95);
In 610 A.D., Muhammad ibn Abdallah, a forty-year-old man from a prosperous merchant family in Mecca, repaired to a cave on nearby Mt. Hira to meditate—a retreat he had made many times. That year, though, his experience was different. An angel appeared and seized him, speaking to him the words of God. Muhammad fell to his knees and crawled home to his wife. "Wrap me up!" he cried. He feared for his sanity. But, as the voice revisited him, he came to believe that it truly issued from God. It called on him to reform his society. Poor people were to be given charity; slaves were to be treated justly; usury was to be outlawed. Muhammad's tribesmen, the Quraysh, were polytheists, like most people in the Arabian Peninsula at that time, but this God, Allah, proclaimed that he was the only God. He was the same deity that the Jews and the Christians worshipped. Jesus Christ wasn't his son, though. Christ was just a prophet, like the prophets of the Old Testament. Their word was now superseded by Muhammad's, as their creeds were supplanted by this new one, Islam.
When Muhammad started preaching in Mecca, people saw him as a harmless crank, but as he gained followers he began to be regarded as a menace. Mecca was an important trading hub, with rich merchants. Muhammad's God forbade all ostentation. Furthermore, if, as he instructed, the pagan idols were to be discarded, that would mean no more revenue from their shrines. In 622, Muhammad and his followers were driven out of Mecca. They fled to Yathrib, which became known as Medina, and from there they warred with their native city. In the beginning, Muhammad's treatment of his fellow-monotheists the Jews and the Christians was conciliatory, but new religions do not normally establish themselves with the help of older religions. The local Jewish tribes conspired against him. After a decisive battle in 627, Muhammad had seven hundred Jews beheaded in Medina's central market. In 630, he and his men took Mecca. Muhammad ordered the destruction of the three hundred and sixty idols around the city's great temple, the Kabah. He proclaimed the supremacy of Islam, and reportedly sent messengers to the rulers of Persia, Byzantium, Yemen, and Ethiopia bidding them to convert. According to his biographer Karen Armstrong, he spent his few remaining years trying to establish peace, sometimes over the objections of his lieutenants.
Soon after Muhammad's death, in 632, the record of what God had said to him was collected in the Koran, and his contemporaries' testimonies about his life were gathered in the Hadith. At the same time, Islam expanded, with a speed unique in history. One of the obligations imposed on the faithful by the Koran was jihad, or struggle. This has been translated as "holy war," and there are passages in the Koran to support such a reading, notably the recommendation that Muslims kill enemies of the faith: "Fight against them until idolatry is no more and Allah's religion reigns supreme." But just a few paragraphs later the Koran makes the opposite decree: "There shall be no compulsion in religion." Some interpreters of the Koran—particularly in recent years, when holy war has become a matter of public alarm—have argued that "jihad" actually means spiritual combat, every Muslim's fight within himself against the temptations of evil. I don't know why a book that was collected, rather than composed, should have to be internally consistent, or why a religious document that originated within a nomadic society in the seventh century and includes such things as the moon splitting in two should be asked to conform to post-Enlightenment thought. The Bible also contradicts itself, and has water turning into wine. Such matters are a problem only for literalists. As for slaying one's enemies, this is enthusiastically recommended in Psalms ("Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones"), as it is in many premodern writings.
In any case, however much Muhammad's immediate successors may have struggled with their souls, they also, in the eighty-some years following his death, conquered Syria, Egypt, North Africa, Anatolia, Iraq, and Persia. By the beginning of the eighth century, Muslim forces stood at the northwest corner of Africa. There, only the Strait of Gibraltar, nine miles wide, separated them from the Iberian Peninsula. Iberia at that time was ruled by the Visigoths, a Christian people who did their best to wipe out other religions within their territory—Judaism, for example. There is some evidence that the Iberian Jews invited the Muslims to invade. In 711, they did so. The state that they established in Iberia, and maintained for almost four centuries, is the subject of David Levering Lewis's "God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570 to 1215" (Norton; $29.95).
This book has to be understood in context, or, actually, two contexts. The first is post-colonialism, the effort on the part of scholars from the nineteen-seventies onward to correct the biases that accompanied and justified the colonization of eighty-five per cent of the earth by European powers between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries. In that period, according to Edward Said's 1978 "Orientalism"—the founding document of post-colonial thought—history-writing about the Near East and the Middle East was an arm of empire. Its goal was to make non-Western peoples seem uncivilized, so that European control would appear a boon. Since Said, much writing on Europe's former colonies has been an effort to redress that injustice.
The other context in which Lewis's book must be read is, of course, the history of terrorism, since the late nineteen-seventies, on the part of people claiming to be instructed by the Koran. When this started, most Westerners had little idea of what the Muslim world was. Harems, hookahs, carpets—that was about it. Nor, after the terrorist attacks, was it easy to catch up in any proper way, for, while there has been an outpouring of books on Islam in the past two decades, many of them were for or against it. A number of prominent intellectuals have denounced Islam. Other people have protested that the vast majority of Muslims do not support terrorism. Some historians have condemned not just the demonization of Islam but the West's ignorance of the Muslim world—a failure now seen as political folly, not to speak of arrogance. Scholars went to their desks to testify to the glories of Islamic cultures. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, in the foreword to her magnificent anthology "The Legacy of Muslim Spain" (1992)—a collection of forty-nine essays describing not just the politics and the religion of Muslim Iberia but its cities, architecture, music, poetry, calligraphy, and cooking—calls the omission of Islam from the West's story of civilization a "historical crime."
Lewis's book is part of that revision. The Muslims came to Europe, he writes, as "the forward wave of civilization that was, by comparison with that of its enemies, an organic marvel of coordinated kingdoms, cultures, and technologies in service of a politico-cultural agenda incomparably superior" to that of the primitive people they encountered there. They did Europe a favor by invading. This is not a new idea, but Lewis takes it further: he clearly regrets that the Arabs did not go on to conquer the rest of Europe. The halting of their advance was instrumental, he writes, in creating "an economically retarded, balkanized, and fratricidal Europe that . . . made virtues out of hereditary aristocracy, persecutory religious intolerance, cultural particularism, and perpetual war." It was "one of the most significant losses in world history and certainly the most consequential since the fall of the Roman Empire." This is a bold hypothesis.
The Muslims took most of Spain in a little over three years. The Visigoths had more men, but the Arabs were very skillful warriors, seeming to dance in front of the enemy, attacking, retreating, attacking again. Here and elsewhere, Lewis appears to see them as clever underdogs, David to Goliath, Muhammad Ali to George Foreman. He inventories the great sacks of gold and silver and precious stones that, together with vast numbers of slaves and young women (harem-bound), they sent back to their caliph in Damascus, the capital of the empire. Included in the shipments were the heads, pickled in brine, that they had removed from Visigoth grandees. In 714, they were just short of the Pyrenees, the northern border of Iberia. The peninsula was now theirs. They renamed it Al Andalus.
As news of the conquest spread, Arabs from the East streamed into Iberia, and they brought with them the conflicts brewing among them—above all, a nasty feud between northern and southern Arabs. The first twenty-two emirs (governors) of Al Andalus had an average reign of two years apiece. Stability, or as much of it as Muslim Spain ever had, began with the reign of Abd al-Rahman I, a Syrian-born prince who took over in 756 and managed to stay in power until his death, thirty-two years later. Rahman is the hero of "God's Crucible." Lewis loves him, and calls him by his sobriquet, the Falcon. Rahman was a firm ruler—he had taken his throne by force—but he was also a man of the people. Lewis describes him strolling about the capital city, Córdoba, in a white djellabah, without bodyguards, and preaching at Friday services in the mosque. Raised in a palace, he was an arts lover. It was he who built the Great Mosque of Córdoba, the most spectacular extant example of Muslim Spain's architectural achievements. He also botanized, and imported to Spain its first date palms, its first lemons, limes, and grapefruit, as well as almonds, apricots, saffron, and henna. This of course was good for trade, which flourished during his time.
Accordingly, so did Spain's cities, led by Córdoba, which under Rahman had an estimated population of about a hundred thousand. Lewis describes the metropolis that the emir left to his successors: "The qasr"—palace—"was new, completed just as the Falcon ordered the foundations laid for the Friday (Great) Mosque. Not many steps away were the public baths. Nearby was the central market, where basic commodities of bread, vegetables, fruit, oil, and lamb at regulated prices were upstaged by Persian carpets, Damascus metalware, China silks, fine leather and jewelry, slaves, and much else supplied on demand by the Muslim world economy. . . . The capital's streets, following no particular pattern from the long wall beside the gray Guadalquivir River, linked neighborhoods where Jews, Berbers, Catholics and Orthodox, Arabs and muwalladun"—non-Arab converts to Islam—"lived as though in their own separate worlds. Sephardic apothecaries, Visigoth blacksmiths, and Greek surgeons offered services in these long, narrow arteries." Orange and lemon trees in the public gardens perfumed the air. Outside the city, "the long Guadalquivir plain, abundantly irrigated by waterwheels, was carpeted with cereal plantations of wheat, rye, and barley, and olive trees forever." You want to move there.
Rahman was the founder of Muslim Spain's famous convivencia. Translated literally, the word means "living together," in spite of differences, and this idea is the burning center of "God's Crucible." I think it is the reason that Lewis chose to write about Muslim Spain. He is not an Arabist. He is best known for a two-volume biography of W. E. B. Du Bois (1993 and 2000), which won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for each volume. But that book, if it is not about Arabs, is about racial justice, and it is for the furtherance of such justice that Lewis so admires Rahman. Nevertheless, as he points out, the convivencia had its limits. It was not just a humane policy—an act of obedience to the Koran ("There shall be no compulsion in religion") and a way of being civilized—but also a matter of Realpolitik. Iberia was a ragbag of religious and ethnic groups. Tolerance, what we would now call multiculturalism, was more likely to hold them together than forced conversion. Furthermore, the convivencia never involved complete equality. In the early years, a number of restrictions were placed on Jews and Christians. They had to wear identification badges. They could not proselytize, and they were required to pray quietly. Their houses could not be taller than Muslims' houses. Most important, they had to pay a heavy tax, called the jizya. In time, many of these rules (not including the tax) fell away. Jews, especially, were allowed to enter public service, as scribes, clerks, advisers. They taught the Muslims how to run a government, Lewis writes. The golden age of Al Andalus, he says, was also the golden age of Sefarad, the Sephardic Jews. But even those who did not have brilliant careers no doubt found badges and taxes preferable to forced conversion or death. Eventually, many Jews and Christians did convert—probably, in many cases, to avoid the tax. At the end of the eighth century, the vast majority of people in Iberia were Christians. Two hundred years later, the majority were Muslims.
The Muslims never ruled all of Iberia. Certain regions, particularly in the north, remained independent, or were only loosely allied with the emirate, and they repeatedly rebelled. Then there was the strife within the Muslim populace. Christians and Jews were not the only ones who received unequal treatment—any non-Arab did. That included the descendants of the North African Berbers whom the Arabs had added to their empire at the beginning of the eighth century and who came with them to Spain. The Iberian Berbers were Muslims, and the emirate's best warriors. (Tariq ibn Zayid, who led the invasion of Iberia, was a Berber, and so was his cavalry.) They also outnumbered the Arabs in Spain. Therefore, they resented their second-class status. For much of the history of Al Andalus, the emirs had to deal with Berber revolts. Another reason the Iberian Arabs had to go back to war was that the conversions to Islam, in freeing people from the jizya, were depleting the treasury. The emirs had to find more infidels to tax. Finally, there was the command of jihad. The Arabs had never meant to stop at the Pyrenees, and, in 732, only twenty-one years after they entered Iberia, they scaled the great mountains and went down the other side.
The kingdom they were invading was Frankland—roughly, France, Belgium, and parts of western Germany—under the rule of Charles the Hammer, or, in French, Charles Martel. The Muslims lost some engagements and won others, but because of a Berber revolt at home they were soon forced to withdraw. In 778, the Franks—now under the leadership of Charles Martel's grandson, Charles I, the Great, or Charlemagne—retaliated. Second to Rahman, Charlemagne is a hero in Lewis's eyes: not just a military genius but a good man and a dashing fellow. Lewis tells us three times that the Frankish king stood six feet three inches tall. He pictures him, his blond hair flowing, his blue cape billowing behind him, astride a huge white stallion. If the Franks were primitive, Lewis says, the peoples whom Charlemagne had conquered—the Saxons, the Lombards, the Avars—were more so. Their new king tried to improve them. He imposed chastity on the priests, to their distress; he forbade incest, apparently a popular practice among the people. To elevate the culture of Frankland, he founded the Palace School, a combination think tank and college, and imported learned men to staff it, but his efforts were limited by the fact that he was constantly in the field. Charlemagne's neighbors did not submit easily to his rule—especially since, unlike the Muslims, he required them to convert. So when he wasn't conquering he was reconquering. That is what ended his Spanish campaign. After a few months, he received news that the Saxons were in revolt, and he had to go home.
Both Rahman and Charlemagne were primarily founders, men whose actions bore their finest fruit after their deaths—in Charlemagne's case, long after his death. (Rahman died in 788; Charlemagne, in 814.) But their struggles are the central human drama of Lewis's book, and once that is over he loses heart somewhat. In the case of Frankland, he could hardly do otherwise. Less than thirty years after Charlemagne's death, the empire that he had worked so strenuously to unite was carved up into three parts, one for each of his grandsons. Meanwhile, the Vikings invaded, and the divided kingdom was powerless to stop them. By the end of the ninth century, Frankland was a ruin. "Walled settlements anchored timorous villagers and peasants driven from their land," Lewis writes. "Blackened silhouettes of abbeys and monasteries outlined the horizon." The Vikings did not care to have palace schools. "They are the filthiest race that God ever created," a Muslim ambassador wrote. "They do not wipe themselves after going to stool, nor wash themselves . . . any more than if they were wild asses."
Al Andalus died more slowly. The Vikings made no headway there; Muslim Spain was attacked, as usual, by its own—the Iberian Berbers, the Christian territories of the north—and by North African Berbers who came in as reinforcements and then seized power. These Africans brought with them a form of Islam far more strict and exclusionary than Iberia had known before. Between that and a cycle of rebellions and reprisals, convivencia came to be viewed as a form of laxity. In this late period, the armies were not headed by Arabs. Prosperity had softened the Arab élite. They liked the good life; they had little taste for war, where you couldn't get a decent meal or a bath. (The Iberian Muslims felt strongly about personal hygiene. They had toothpaste and underarm deodorant.) So they stayed home, and sent Berbers, Africans, and slaves to fight their wars—less wisely, and more brutally, than they would have done. Here, Lewis sounds a tragic note: the more civilized a people, the more vulnerable.
Year by year, the good life vanished. Book burnings began, together with pogroms. Revolts and reprisals were conducted in an ecstasy of violence. When Córdoba, under the emir Muhammad II, was invaded by a rival claimant to the throne, the latter's Berber army raped the women, sacked the city, and knocked down its splendid buildings, including Rahman's palace. (They spared the Great Mosque.) Twenty years later, the Iberian caliphate was dissolved, and the peninsula was divided among taifas, or petty kings, who ruled with a new cruelty. At this point, the Reconquista—the recapturing of Spain by the Christians—began in earnest. Toledo fell to Alfonso VI of León and Castile, a Catholic king, in 1085. Four more centuries passed before the expulsion of the last emir from Granada, in 1492, but Lewis gets through them fast. He doesn't want to talk about it.
Instead, he turns to Muslim Spain's contributions to learning, which peaked as its political situation was declining. Architecture continued to flourish (the Alhambra, in Granada, was begun in the thirteenth century), as did music, poetry, science, and mathematics. It is thanks to Muslim Spain that we no longer have to cope with Roman numerals. Paper-making technology was imported from China. The central library of Córdoba housed four hundred thousand volumes. But Al Andalus's most lasting cultural achievement was its translation and elaboration of ancient Greek texts. In the tenth century, the physician Hasdai ibn Shaprut supervised an Arabic translation of the Greek De Materia Medica, by Dioscorides, a surgeon to the Roman army in the first century. Retranslated into Latin, this treatise was a standard medical reference until the Enlightenment. In the twelfth century, Averroës (Ibn Rushd) wrote his commentaries on Aristotle, and Moses Maimonides (Musa ibn Mayum) produced his Aristotle-inflected "Guide to the Perplexed." Both these Córdoban philosophers took on the task of reconciling reason with faith, of proving that there was a God. For the Christian world, that job would be done by the Scholastics, above all by St. Thomas Aquinas, whose writings were the basis of European philosophy from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. But Aquinas relied heavily on Averroës's reading of Aristotle. Insofar as Western culture grew out of Greek culture, and became "classical," it did so because the scholars of Al Andalus transmitted Greek thought to western Europe.
By the twelfth century, though, such thought was dangerous in Spain. (Averroës's books were burned; some were lost permanently.) It was more dangerous on the part of Jews, like Maimonides. He died in exile, bitterly reproaching his homeland for its abandonment of liberal ideas. (Here one thinks of the European Jews of the nineteen-thirties.) With the deaths of those two men, the lights go out in "God's Crucible."
In view of Lewis's high opinion of learning in Al Andalus, it is amazing how little space he gives it. Averroës and Maimonides get seven pages between them, but, given their importance, that's meagre. Lewis doesn't care much about art, either. In his description of the fabled palace Zahra, built by Rahman III, in the tenth century, what he stresses is not so much its art as its political impact: its ability to awe visitors, humble them, impress them with the power of the caliphate. Social history, too, is largely absent from "God's Crucible"—we get no sense of what it was like to be an Andalusian citizen, rich or poor—and there is almost nothing on the country's religion, which is a strange omission in a book about a theocracy. Basically, "God's Crucible" is about fighting and ruling. Lewis makes warfare exciting. ("The heavily armored cavalry . . . commenced the attack in a chorus of 'Allahu akbar' "—"God is great"—"tearing up the hill from the Roman road in a nimbus of nostril steam from their mounts behind volleys of arrows.") He is also partial to succession struggles. We get to hear how Pippin II, Charles Martel's father, roused himself from a coma long enough to issue a death warrant for some throne-grabbers and, that done, lapsed back into the coma and died. Lewis also gives us the excellent sobriquets of the rulers in his story, not just Charles the Hammer but Bertha of the Big Foot (Charlemagne's mother) and al-Walid the Inadequate. Even when he doesn't have a story, he tells one. Little is known about the monks who wrote what history we have of the Dark Ages from a European perspective. But Lewis imagines such a chronicler, at the abbey of St. Denis, outside Paris, on a cold night in the early eighth century: "Perhaps he sweetened a carafe of rough wine with honey or cinnamon while he shivered near the fire in a smoky room, his eyes straining in the penumbra as the stylus incised momentous events on the page." It's like a movie. Finally, Lewis has a wonderful command of narrative structure. Anyone writing the history of Muslim Spain must also, in some measure, give a history of the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Frankish Empire, and indeed the Muslim Empire that ruled the East before and during the Arab rule of Iberia. Lewis does so very skillfully, moving these polities in and out as if he were operating a rotating stage set.
His lively prose sometimes tips over into vulgarity. When he quotes people, their words are "gasped" or "winced." When there is a battle on the Rhône, the water flows crimson; when there is a battle on the Euphrates, it flows burgundy. Lewis likes extended metaphors, including the mixed variety. ("The French nation and the papacy, the future house of Europe's post and lintel, were entities in utero as the Muslim dawn broke over the peninsula.") And he has a weakness for jargon and cliché. Kings recruit "the best and brightest." If they are doing well, they are "on a roll." "On the minus side," they may get locked in a "superpower death struggle," and if they don't use "scorched-earth tactics" they may go into "a downward spiral" and lose their "real estate." There is something like this on every other page.
The goosing-up is often in service of showing that the Franks were less civilized than the Muslims—a point that Lewis cannot stop making. The Muslims built cities; the Franks lived in uncleared forests. The Muslim emirs had marble palaces; the early Frankish kings, wooden houses. The Muslims got around on their fabled stallions; Charlemagne's ancestors were "trundled to their few ceremonial duties in ox-drawn carts." The Muslims had silver coins, and traded in silks and spices. The Franks had a largely barter economy, "little better than the Late Neolithic." Upper-class Muslims are shown attending salons, where they read poetry and discuss ideas, unlike Pippin the Short, Charlemagne's father, who received ambassadors in a room filled with "bearskins, stacked weaponry, snoring dogs, cluttered bones, and upturned wine jugs." Frankish knights spend only winter in their homes, "with howling wolves outside and indiscriminate copulation within." Come spring, they discontinue copulation and begin slaughter, which occupies them for the rest of the year. The Muslims' northern foes are "piranhas," "veteran killers," "unbathed, larcenous"—hairy, too. Their culture is "the Occidental void." Often, Lewis compares their activities to twentieth-century atrocities: ethnic cleansing, the "final solution."
Rightly, he does not make a fuss over practices—conquest, slavery, and the subjugation of women—that, however unjust to our eyes, were normal in the Dark Ages, but when he can give the Muslims an edge in these matters he does so. Unlike others, he says, they did not enslave their co-religionists, only infidels. (Why is that better?) As for restrictions on women—an inflamed topic in our time—he acknowledges that the Muslims' were harsher than the Franks', but he believes that Muhammad did not intend this severity, and that the Koran is kinder to women than either the Torah or St. Paul. When the Muslims crucify infidels, this is one of the "regrettable aspects of nation-building." When the Muslim state falls, the jihad on which it was built is not in view—only the Christian jihad. The reason Lewis concludes his book in 1215 is that that was the year in which Pope Innocent III launched the Albigensian Crusade, an especially vicious example of the religious fanaticism that, in Lewis's view, Europe developed in reaction to the Muslims, and inflicted on a bleeding world for many centuries thereafter.
If, as Edward Said wrote, the old history books were covertly ideological, the current ones tend to be overtly ideological, as each new generation of scholars rides in to rescue supposedly worthy peoples who were wronged by earlier scholarship and, in their time, by axe-wielding conquerors. But all these peoples, or all the ones in Lewis's book, were conquerors. If the Christians took Spain from the Muslims, the Muslims had taken it from the Visigoths, who had appropriated it from the Romans, who had seized it from the Carthaginians, who had thrown out the Phoenicians. Lewis does not pretend that the Muslims were not conquerors; he simply justifies their conquest on the ground of their belief in convivencia, a pressing matter today. I can foresee a time when another matter important to us, the threat of ecological catastrophe, will prompt a historian to write a book in praise of the early Europeans whom Lewis finds so inferior to the Muslims. The Franks lived in uncleared forests, while the Muslims built fine cities, with palaces and aqueducts? All the better for the earth. The Franks were fond of incest? Endogamy keeps societies small, prevents the growth of rapacious nation-states. The same goes for the Franks' largely barter economy. Trade such as the Muslims practiced—far-flung and transacted with money—leads to consolidation. That's how we got global corporations.
Each new problem in our history engenders a revision of past history. Many of today's historians acknowledge this, and argue that their books, if politicized, are simply more honest about that than the politicized books of the past. This pessimism about the possibility of finding a stable truth may be realistic, but it seems to sanction, even encourage, special pleading—of which "God's Crucible," for all its virtues, is an example.
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quraan burning
Planned Muslim Response to Qur'an Burning by Pastor Jones on September 11 in Mulberry, Florida
August 19, 2013| Dallas, Texas
Mike Ghouse
Text/Talk: (214) 325-1916
Mirza A Beg
(205) 454-8797
We as Muslims plan to respond to pastor Terry Jones' planned burning of 3000 copies of Quran on September 11, 2013 in positive terms.
Our response - we will reclaim the standard of behavior practiced by the Prophet concerning "scurrilous and hostile criticism of the Qur'an" (Muhammad Asad Translation Note 31, verse 41:34). It was "To overcome evil with good is good, and to resist evil by evil is evil." It is also strongly enjoined in the Qur'an in the same verse 41:34, "Good and evil deeds are not equal. Repel evil with what is better; then you will see that one who was once your enemy has become your dearest friend."
God willing Muslims will follow the divine guidance and pray for the restoration of Goodwill, and on that day many Muslim organizations will go on a "blood drive" to save lives and serve humanity with kindness.
We invite fellow Americans of all faiths, races, and ethnicities to join us to rededicate the pledge, "One nation under God", and to build a cohesive America where no American has to live in apprehension, discomfort or fear of fellow Americans. This event is a substitute for our 10th Annual Unity Day Celebration (www.UnitydayUSA.com) held in Dallas, but now it will be at Mulberry, Florida.
Unwittingly Pastor Jones has done us a favor by invigorating us by his decision to burn nearly 3000 copies Quran on September 11, 2013. Obviously he is not satisfied by the notoriety he garnered by burning one Qur'an last year.
As Muslims and citizens we honor the free speech guaranteed in our constitution. We have no intentions to criticize, condemn or oppose Pastor Terry Jones' freedom of expression. Instead, we will be donating blood and praying for goodness to permeate in our society.
We plan to follow Jesus Christ (pbuh), a revered prophet in Islam as well as Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) – that of mitigating the conflicts and nurturing good will for the common good of the society.
We hope, this event and the message will remind Muslims elsewhere in the world as well, that violence is not the way. Muslims, who react violently to senseless provocation, should realize that, violence causes more violence, and besmirches the name of the religion that we hold so dear. We believe that Prophet Muhammad was a mercy to the mankind, and we ought to practice what we believe and preach. We must not insult Islam by the negative reactions of a few.
We can only hope it will bring about a change in the attitude of the followers of Pastor Jones, and in the behavior of those Muslims who reacted violently the last time Pastor sought notoriety – We hope this small step towards a bridge to peaceful coexistence would propel us towards building a cohesive society.
Like most Americans a majority of Muslims quietly go about their own business, but it is time to speak up and take positive action instead of negative reaction. May this message of peace and goodwill reverberate and reach many shores.
Lastly, we appreciate the Citizens of Mulberry, Florida, Honorable Mayor George Hatch, City Commissioners, police and Fire Chiefs for handing this situation very well. This will add a 'feather of peace' in the City's reputation. We hope Mulberry will be a catalyst in showing the way in handling conflict with dignity and peace.
We thank the Media for giving value to the work towards peace rather than conflict.
URL- http://worldmuslimcongress.blogspot.com/2013/08/planned-muslim-response-to-quran_18.html
Thank you.
The people in Dallas are making an effort to understand and clean their own hearts first, when we are free from bias, it would be easy to share that with others. Islam teaches us in so many ways to "respect the otherness of others" and it is time we find simple practical ways of doing it.


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It just kept getting bigger.
What started out as a public warning from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency on Sept. 16 about a ground beef recall from XL Foods' Lakeside packing facility ballooned over the next month into the largest meat recall in Canadian history.
By October, more than 2,000 beef products, including a wide range of steaks, roasts and prepared foods, were pulled from shelves across Canada and in the United States as far away as Puerto Rico.
As the recall expanded, so did reports of illnesses linked to the tainted beef. Health officials reported that eight people in Edmonton had fallen ill, in addition to others in Quebec, British Columbia and Newfoundland and Labrador. No one died from consuming the E. coli 0157: H7, although some people were hospitalized; they ranged in age from five to 63.
The XL Foods beef recall had serious consequences on several fronts beyond the grocery store shelves.
Alberta's beef industry, after dealing with mad cow disease a few years ago, faced renewed financial uncertainty as the U.S. temporarily shut its border to meat from the XL Foods plant and the CFIA suspended Lakeside's operating licence, shutting down one of the biggest slaughter and packing operations in the country for two weeks.
In the town of Brooks, 2,200 employees were temporarily laid off as Lakeside was shut down and company officials worked to clean the plant and improve procedures that allowed E. coli to enter the products.
It led to a shakeup in the meat industry as the Edmonton-based owners of XL Foods, the Nilsson Brothers, signed a deal with JBS, a Brazilian meat packing giant, to manage the Brooks facility with the option to buy it outright.
The recall once again put Canada's food safety inspection system under the microscope as the CFIA came under serious criticism for its oversight at the federally inspected facility and raised questions about why American officials flagged the E. coli problems first. Those issues will continue to reverberate in 2013.

subset: commoncrawl


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Baldwin wins US Senate seat
MADISON, Wis. — Democratic U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin has won Wisconsin's open U.S. Senate seat.
Baldwin defeated former Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson on Tuesday for a seat that's been held by Democrats since 1957. With the victory, Baldwin also becomes the first openly gay candidate to win election to the Senate.
The seven-term congresswoman from Madison built her campaign around the argument that the 70-year-old Thompson no longer spoke for Wisconsin residents.
Baldwin noted that the four-term governor, who hadn't been on a ballot in 14 years, made millions of dollars in the private sector off connections he made while governor and U.S. health secretary.
Thompson had attacked Baldwin as too liberal for Wisconsin, focusing on her position on health care reform.
His defeat marks Thompson's first ever loss in a statewide election.Tammy Baldwin victory speech


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COMPARATIVE BIOMOLECULAR AND THERAPEUTIC EFFECTIVENESS OF COLLABORATIVE INTEGRATIVE INTERVENTION IN MORBIDLY OBESE INDIVIDUALS by Naser Ahmadi A Thesis Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF SCIENCE (CLINICAL AND BIOMEDICAL INVESTIGATIONS) May 2012 Copyright 2012 Naser Ahmadi
Object Description
|Comparative biomolecular and therapeutic effectiveness of collaborative integrative intervention in morbidly obese individuals
|Ahmadi, Naser
|Author email
|Master of Science
|Document type
|Degree program
|Clinical and Biomedical Investigations
|Keck School of Medicine
|Date defended/completed
|Date submitted
|Date approved
|Restricted until
|Date published
|Advisor (committee chair)
|Azen, Stanley P.
|Advisor (committee member)
Hodis, Howard N.
Mack, Wendy Jean
|Background. Obesity is prevalent and linked with inflammation, insulin resistance, dyslipidemia, atherosclerosis, and associated with significant morbidity and mortality. The economic burden of obesity-related illnesses is substantial, with estimates ranging from 2% to 7% of the total US health care expenditures and billions of dollars in direct and indirect costs to society. This goal will be accomplished by collaborative integrative interventions (CI) in morbidly obese individuals in which eligible subjects will be randomized to MI plus Gastric bypass surgery (GBS), intense exercise and moderate caloric restriction (IE-MCR), or anti-obesity medications (AOM). ❧ Importance/Significance. There is a cumulative increase in the rate of obesity, up to two thirds of the US population. This randomized clinical trial will assess: 1) the change in biologic and clinical phenotypes in response to CI, 2) the change in genotypes in response to CI, and 3) Comparative biomolecular, therapeutic and cost effectiveness analyses of methods of CI to develop individualized intervention models to improve management of morbidly obese individuals. vascular function measured as coronary distensibility index (CDI), atherosclerotic burden measured as carotid intima media thickness (CIMT) and coronary plaque volume (CPV), metabolically active adipose tissue (MAC), oxidative stress and inflammatory biomarkers se well as changes in DNA methylation patterns, expression and regulation of promoter regions of genes provides fundamental information to assess the beneficial effects within and across CI methods on obesity management. This study investigates the underlying determinant of successful management of obesity by comparing biologic, clinical phenotype, genotype and cost effectiveness of CI methods, also enhances individualized anti-obesity interventions. ❧ Method. The CI methods are hypothesized to improve CDI and reduce CIMT, CPV and MAC, also increase up-regulation of cardio-protective genes. Over a 3 year period, 150 morbidly obese individuals' ages 18 or older and free of clinical cardiovascular disease will be recruited from the Obesity Clinic of the Greater Los Angeles VA Health Care System, University of California Los Angeles and Cedars Sinai Medical Center. One hundred and fifty eligible subjects will be randomized to either of CI methods inclusive of MI plus GBS, IE-MCR, or AOM (50 in each group). All subjects will receive weekly MI training for a year. MI plus IE-MCR will receive lectures on exercise and general dietary measures including calorie counting. They will prepare their own food, with protien:carbohydrate:fat ratio of 30:45:25 and over 70% their resting daily energy expenditure, and completed daily food and exercise journals. They will exercise 3 ± 2 hours/day, about half supervised, for a year. MI plus GBS will undergo primary laparoscopic RYGB. MI plus AOB will receive xx pills daily for a period of 1-year. All subjects will be followed before, during and after interventions. Subjects will undergo carotid ultrasound and CT at baseline and at 1-year follow-up, also their oxidative stress and inflammatory biomarkers as well as genetic markers will be assessed. CI methods' compliance and side effects will be evaluated.
|collaborative integrative interventions; motivational interviewing; gastric bypass surgery; intense exercise and moderate caloric restriction; anti-obesity medications ; atherosclerosis; fat mass; genomics; comparative biomolecular; therapeutic and cost effectiveness analyses
|Part of collection
|University of Southern California dissertations and theses
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|University of Southern California
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|Los Angeles, California
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|University of Southern California. Libraries
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|University of Southern California
|Ahmadi, Naser
|Physical access
|The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the author, as the original true and official version of the work, but does not grant the reader permission to use the work if the desired use is covered by copyright. It is the author, as rights holder, who must provide use permission if such use is covered by copyright. The original signature page accompanying the original submission of the work to the USC Libraries is retained by the USC Libraries and a copy of it may be obtained by authorized requesters contacting the repository e-mail address given.
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|University of Southern California Digital Library
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|USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 7002, 106 University Village, Los Angeles, California 90089-7002, USA
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|COMPARATIVE BIOMOLECULAR AND THERAPEUTIC EFFECTIVENESS OF COLLABORATIVE INTEGRATIVE INTERVENTION IN MORBIDLY OBESE INDIVIDUALS by Naser Ahmadi A Thesis Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF SCIENCE (CLINICAL AND BIOMEDICAL INVESTIGATIONS) May 2012 Copyright 2012 Naser Ahmadi


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Sony's first attempt at creating bold new tablet devices elicited mixed responses, as the S1 and S2 ended up prioritizing x-factor over plain old usability. However, that hasn't stopped the Japanese electronics giant from thinking out of the box again.
At this year's CES, Sony is showcasing two new tablet concepts – the Slate and the Hybrid. The Slate is a sleek tablet with a unique oval design and a beautiful silver back. However, once again, Sony's penchant for uniqueness means that the tablet is not without its flaws. The bezel is unnecessarily thick, and the rear has oddly placed buttons that might be prone to accidental presses.
Paired with the Slate is an equally stunning wireless keyboard. The remarkable design of the keyboard manages to transform a mundane accessory into something drool worthy.
The most noteworthy concept on display was the Hybrid, which is a cross between traditional laptops and tablets. It is essentially a tablet that docks with a keyboard with embedded speakers. Once again, the design is simply stunning. Interestingly enough, the Hybrid also features a blast from the past in the form of a stylus that fits in beneath the keyboard.
Even though both of these devices carry the old Vaio tag, they represent intriguing attempts by Sony to redefine what we expect from a tablet. Absolutely nothing is known about the technical specifications of the Hybrid and the Slate, which were tucked inside a glass case to fend off the inquisitive journalists. In fact, we don't even know if Sony plans on manufacturing them.


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Book Flights to Finland
Gran Canaria to Helsinki
Tenerife to Oulu
Visit Finland AND FLY TO Finland WITH FINNAIR
Finland is nature at its very best. Finland spends most of the year as a frozen paradise before bursting into life and colour for a short-lived summer. Finnair serves Helsinki (HEL), Ivalo (IVL), Joensuu (JOE), Kajaani (KAJ), Kemi (KEM), Kittilä (KTT), Kokkola (KOK), Kuopio (KUO), Kuusamo (KAO), Oulu (OUL), Rovaniemi (RVN) and Vaasa (VAA). At Finnair, we are proud of our long heritage. We've been operating for over 90 years and have a wealth of experience in customer care and enjoyable, comfortable journeys. Book your flights to Finland with us today to experience our classic Nordic hospitality.
Destinations in Finland served by Finnair
- Helsinki is a great starting point for your trip to Finland. You can explore the beautiful white Helsinki Cathedral set in Senate Square, check out the local art galleries, or just enjoy some delicious local cuisine in one of the city's many restaurants. Book your plane tickets to Finland's capital for a diverse and interesting holiday.
- Ivalo may seem like a small town, but it's one of the largest in the region. Fly to Ivalo if you fancy trying some ice fishing or want to catch the Northern Lights or the midnight sun.
- Kajaani is a quiet settlement in the Kainuu region. Head to nearby Paltaniemi to see the picturesque riverside church, or book a husky tour to experience the snowy wilderness.
- Kemi's main attractions include a castle made of snow and icebreaker cruises. It's a magical and breath-taking destination like no other.
- Kuusamo should be your next stop if you want to glide down some of the world's best ski slopes.
- Joensuu, meaning 'river mouth' in Finnish, was an important trading port in the 19th century. These days it's a modern and lively university town.
- Kokkola is an ancient fishing town, with wooden houses and dusty streets. Catch a boat out to Tankar Island and take a look around the old Lighthouse Station.
- The city of Oulu is made up of a series of islands connected by bridges. It's known for its Arctic berry markets and its university's technology graduates – some of the best in the world. Oulu is a great destination to visit on any trip to Finland.
- If you want to explore western Lapland and see some awe-inspiring landscapes, Kittilä and nearby Levi are the places for you.
- The capital of Lapland, Rovaniemi, is Santa Claus's official hometown. The streets are even laid out in the shape of a reindeer's head and antlers when viewed from above! If planning a Christmas trip, be sure to reserve your tickets to Finland well in advance.
- Kuopio is a sunny lakeside town with a handful of interesting museums to satisfy those who are more into culture than the great outdoors. Nonetheless, it will appeal most to those who like hiking, pleasure cruises and enjoying a beer in the sunshine.
- Vaasa is known for its beaches, with seven great ones near the city center. It's also in one of the sunniest parts of Finland. Fly to Vaasa for a great summer holiday in Finland.
Typical food and drink in Finland
Finnish cuisine is based on whole grain starches such as rye bread or oats alongside berries and meats. Traditional Finnish food relies heavily on locally sourced ingredients such as barley, reindeer, and lingonberry. Fish and vegetables are also often used alongside dairy products such as buttermilk. Fly to Finland and satisfy your taste buds with popular dishes like lohikeitto (a creamy salmon soup), mustamakkara (blood pudding), reindeer, herring, and vorschmack (salty minced meat).
From festivals with religious roots and cultural celebrations to summer music festivals and tantalising foodie events, there are many great festivals to enjoy in Finland.
Juhannus, also known as Midsummer Festival, is one of Finland's most popular events. Held at the end of June, festivities include large bonfires, maypole dancing, music, feasting, and drinking.
In July, the week-long Kaustinen Folk Music Festival is the largest folk music and dance festival of all the Nordic nations.
Towards the end of August, the Night of the Arts takes place in various Finnish cities. Diverse art events start in the early evening and continue until late at night.
Helsinki is home to the Baltic Circle Festival each November. It's a top event for fans of the arts and film.
Christmas is an enchanting time to visit Finland and celebrations for New Year are lively.
If you plan on visiting one of Finland's awesome festivals, be sure to book your Finland flights in plenty of time to avoid disappointment.
Practical information about Finland
- Currency – Euro (€).
- Time Zone – UTC+02:00.
- Tipping – Tipping is not expected but will be appreciated.
- Water – The tap water in Finland is safe to drink.
- Electricity – 220 volts or 50 Hz.
Book flights to Finland for any season and you'll find plenty of great things to see and do.
Weather-wise, summer is often considered the best time to visit Finland with long, sunny days and numerous lively events. Conversely, winter is the best season to enjoy diverse snow sports, meet Santa Claus in Lapland, and spot the Northern Lights. Spring and autumn have pleasant temperatures and are often the best months to get a good deal on your airfare to Finland.
Start your Finland holiday before you even land when you book flights to Finland with Finnair, one of the leading Finnish airlines. We offer flights to Finland from numerous cities worldwide, including Hong Kong, London, Brussels, Stockholm, Frankfurt, and Copenhagen. There are also excellent domestic routes, with Finland flights connecting Helsinki with Oulu, Kuopio, Kemi, Ivalo, Joensuu, Rovaniemi and more.
Don't forget to consider an upgrade to Nordic Business Class when booking your flights to Finland. You can benefit from delicious in-flight cuisine, various priority services, an increased luggage allowance, and other excellent perks.
Madrid (MAD) to Rovaniemi (RVN)MAD-RVN
15.12.20206 Days365€
Barcelona (BCN) to Helsinki (HEL)BCN-HEL
26.04.20203 Days222€
Madrid (MAD) to Helsinki (HEL)MAD-HEL
26.04.20208 Days431€
Barcelona (BCN) to Kittilä (KTT)BCN-KTT
26.04.20203 Days377€
Gran Canaria (LPA) to Helsinki (HEL)LPA-HEL
09.04.20202 Days510€
Barcelona (BCN) to Jyväskylä (JYV)BCN-JYV
26.08.20208 Days254€
Barcelona (BCN) to Oulu (OUL)BCN-OUL
10.07.20204 Days284€
Barcelona (BCN) to Rovaniemi (RVN)BCN-RVN
15.12.20206 Days349€
Madrid (MAD) to Kittilä (KTT)MAD-KTT
26.04.20204 Days415€


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These mugs are a perfect eye catching addition to any salon, being hard wearing enamel they can be use within a wet shave treatment to lather shaving products, alternatively why not collect the set for your clients complimentary cuppa.
Each mug comes packaged in its own distinctive gift box making them ideal for salon promotions, customer loyalty giveaways or as a retail and gift item for those hard to buy for partners, family or friends.
Available in four designs.
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- New from BARBER PRO are a range of retro enamel coated shave mugs, the same hardy type used for camping.


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New Carson High principal to be named
Carson School District has selected a new principal for Carson High but Superintendent Richard Stokes declined to say who that person is at this point.
"We have posted the job and held interviews. We have selected a candidate but we are a little shy of being able to make that public," said Stokes, contacted on vacation this week.
He said the problem is Nevada law prohibits a licensed educator from being under contract with two school districts at the same time and, if the name was released, he said that could jeopardize the person's license.
"They have to be released from their current school district in Nevada first," he said.
Stokes said the name should be released once that technicality is taken care of.


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Catholic Encyclopedia – Saint Willibrord
Bishop of Utrecht, Apostle of the Frisians, and son of Saint Hilgis, born in Northumbria, 658; died at Echternach, Luxemburg, 7 November 739. Willibrord made his early studies at the Abbey of Ripon near York, as a disciple of Saint Wilfrid, and then entered the Benedictine Order. When twenty years old he went to Ireland and spent twelve years in the Abbey of Rathmelsigi (identified by some as Mellifont in Co. Louth) under Saint Egbert. From him Willibrord and eleven companions received the mission to Frisia, at the request of Pepin. They came to Utrecht but did not remain there, repairing to the court of Pepin. In 692 Willibrord went to Rome, received Apostolic authorization, and returned to his missionary labours. At the wish of Pepin he went for a second time to Rome, was consecrated Bishop of the Frisians by Sergius III (21 November 695) in the Church of Saint Cecilia, and given the name of Clement. He also received the pallium from the pope. On his return he laboured among the people assigned to him; to raise recruits for future apostolic work he founded a monastery at Utrecht, where also he built a church in honour of the Holy Redeemer and made it his cathedral. In 698 he established an abbey at the Villa Echternach on the Sure; this villa had been presented to him by Saint Irmina, daughter of Saint Dagobert II, the donation being legally confirmed in 706.
When Radbod gained possession of all Frisia (716) Willibrord was obliged to leave, and Radbod destroyed most of the churches, replaced them by temples and shrines to the idols, and killed many of the missionaries. Willibrord and his companions made trips between the Maas and the Waal, to the North of Brabant, in Thuringia and Geldria, but met with no success in Denmark and Helgoland. After the death of Radbod he returned (719) and repaired the damages done there, being ably assisted in this work by Saint Boniface. Numberless conversions were the result of their labour. Willibrord frequently retired to the Abbey of Echternach to provide more particularly for his own soul; he was buried in the oratory of this abbey, and after death was almost immediately honoured as a saint. Some relics were distributed in various churches, but the greater part remained at the abbey. On 19 Oct., 1031, the relics were placed in a shrine under the main altar of the new basilica. His feast is celebrated on 7 Nov., but in England, by order of Leo XIII, on 29 November. Since his burial Echternacht has been a place of pilgrimage, and Alcuin mentions miracles wrought there. The old church was restored in 1862 and consecrated in September 1868. Another solemn translation of the relics took place on 4 June 1906, from the Church of Saint Peter to the new basilica. On this occasion occurred also the annual procession of the holy dancers. Five bishops in full pontificals assisted; engaged in the dance were 2 Swiss guards, 16 standard-bearers, 3045 singers, 136 priests, 426 musicians, 15,085 dancers, and 2032 players.
No writing can with certainty be attributed to Saint Willibrord except a marginal note in the Calendar of Echternach giving some chronological data. The Life was written by Alcuin and dedicated to BEORNRAD. (Abbot of Echternach). He probably made use of an older one written by a British monk, which is lost. This was used also by THEOFRIC.


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After a 4 month hiatus The Mike Church Show will make its return to the morning drive slot on The CRUSADE Channel going from 7:00-10:00am eastern time as he had since the Channel's inception and indeed since May of 2010 on The SiriusXM Patriot Channel.
Add The KingDude to YOUR commute for just pennies per day and get 30 days for FREE if you signup now for The CRUSADE Chanel's Founders Pass. Click to signup!
Mike Church has emerged as the only traditionally Catholic conservative in talk radio today, anywhere in the world. And I mean traditional.
"The Mike Church Show is the talk radio you thought you were getting and realize you aren't… Sharp, hard hitting and committed to Truth; it will have you screaming at your "radio", until you realize you are agreeing with the argument.
It is the only show worthy of your morning drive listening, period."
Have a Blessed Day,
"Jas Wil"
What Mitter Chur does on talk radio has no equal. Haters are gonna hate but where's the 26 years of top-rated dominance?


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Spastic colon is another term for irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), a common disorder characterized by abdominal cramping, abdominal pain, bloating, constipation and diarrhea.
The term "spastic colon" describes the increase in spontaneous contractions (motility) of muscles in the small and large intestines associated with IBS. These contractions are sometimes called spasms. However, because IBS may also be associated with decreased motility, the term "spastic colon" isn't always accurate.
The cause and severity of IBS varies from person to person. Treatment is aimed at relieving symptoms and may include changing your diet, increasing physical activity, reducing stress, and taking anticholinergic or anti-diarrheal medications.
Michael F. Picco, M.D.
Original article: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/irritable-bowel-syndrome/expert-answers/spastic-colon/FAQ-20058473
Any use of this site constitutes your agreement to the Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy linked below.
Mayo Clinic is a nonprofit organization and proceeds from Web advertising help support our mission. Mayo Clinic does not endorse any of the third party products and services advertised.
A single copy of these materials may be reprinted for noncommercial personal use only. "Mayo," "Mayo Clinic," "MayoClinic.org," "Mayo Clinic Healthy Living," and the triple-shield Mayo Clinic logo are trademarks of Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research.


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Classroom building abbreviations are used for university correspondence and in all classroom reservation requests processed by the Office of the Registrar.
It's a good idea to recheck locations for all your classes during the first week of classes. Room assignments do change, and students are expected to find these changes via CheckMarq.
The Office of the Registrar is the official keeper of academic records including course registrations, grades, transcripts and diplomas.
Find information about...
Trouble finding something? Contact the Office of the Registrar


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Dispersed People Groups
Learn About Tableau
About Global Research
The heart of Global Research is the provision of accurate, relevant and strategic information for Southern Baptists and other partners around the world. Our stewardship is one of advocacy for the unreached who still remain as such, and our confidence is in a God who will one day gather a vast multitude from every nation, tribe, people, and language, which no one can number. It is our prayer that what we provide will contribute to this vision for His glory.


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Gus has a heart of gold to match his gut of goodness. This retiree spends his time mostly bickering with his wife, Tilsie, and goofing around with his pal, Leland Addanac. All Gus wants in life is to enjoy a cold beer and a hot meal without his wife admonishing him about it.
188Recent Appearance:
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As the father of Harvey and the grandfather of Hank, Leland has his hands full trying to play mentor to his troubled progeny. While enjoying his retirement, you can easily find this paranoid hypochondriac plotting and scheming with his thick-as-thieves cronies, Gus and Amos.
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Categories: Glaziers, Door, Window & Shutter Repair and Installation, Door Repairs, Double Glazing
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door repair service, door repairs, double glazing, double glazing installation, double glazing repair, double glazing specialists, Misty Window Repair, patio door repairs, window repair, Window Repairs & Replacement Services
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Window and Door Servicing
DG Servicing is a family run business based in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex. Established in 1983 to repair double glazing in the local area. Over the years DG Servicing have built a large supply of obselete window repair parts. These can be purchased via the ecommerce store www.dgsupplyline.co.uk
30 years later and DG Servicing now provides door repairs and window repairs throughout England and also parts of South Wales.
Testimonials are curated by DG Servicing and are not independently reviewed or verified.
"Excellent service. They install new rollers in our patio doors quickly and efficiently. Thank you so much for coming to London all the way from Essex. You did a great job."
Cally Guy on 22 May 2018
"Great company with a fantastic range of products. I really couldn't fault the service and installation. Highly recommended"
Luke Osborne on 23 February 2018
"They were very quick to respond following some damage sustained in heavy winds. The work was carried out very quickly and efficiently. No mess and no fuss. A much lower price too. I am very happy to recommend them."
Colin Merenda on 22 January 2018
"I would highly recommend this Company to anyone. The gentlemen who replaced my door were very friendly, polite and professional. They were respectful and cleaned up everything during & after they carried out their work. I am very impressed at how it looks, it has been finished to a very high standard. I'm really happy."
Rosita McCartney on 22 January 2019
"Super quick response, great work, amazing engineers - really am so happy!!!! Cannot recommend enough, very reasonable price, all other companies said they couldn't fix our door but DG Servicing did."
Nicky Knowles on 22 January 2019
"Excellent service, courteous staff. Office staff we're extremely helpful and my window handle was repaired very quickly. I was very satisfied with work carried out. I would recommend DG Servicing to all my friends."
Kim Gentry on 22 January 2019
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Wednesday, February 07, 2007
Thought experiment
You're a fairy godmother at a christening. The other two fairy godmothers couldn't make it, so all three wishes go to you - you have three good qualities to give to the baby that's currently lying burbling happily in its golden little cradle. The evil godmother who nobody likes hasn't shown up yet; whether or not she will, and what kind of curse she'll impose if she does, is anyone's guess. You have to equip the kid, not knowing anything about how its life is going to go.
What qualities are you going to give the baby?
Here's mine, to start you off: the baby is going to be brave, kind, and have some common sense.
Argg! I have this situation most nights when I put my youngest daughter to bed. She turned one a couple of weeks ago, and every time she smiles at me I wonder what I would most like to give her to help her cope when she's older. In contrast I also have another daughter who's seven this year, and who is already developing skills which will help her a lot when she's older.
So, what a baby girl REALLY needs is:
1. Independence. It's most important that a girl has the savvy to be nobody's fool. All her life people will try to con her, to get her to agree to things she might not like. She needs to be switched on enough to spot them coming, and not to worry too much if they're offended when she says "no thanks"...
2. Intelligence. Men are, broadly speaking, very stupid (and I should know - I've been one for nearly 40 years), and have too much aggression to think things through properly. Women are by nature better equipped to resolve problems, but they need that extra something to understand and manage all the (usually male) fools in the world, and protect and improve their own lives.
3. A high pain threshold. Although now I can protect my girls with my life if I have to, sooner or later they are going to either get hurt themselves, and/or see people they care deeply about in pain. They'll need to understand this and be strong enough to move through those times, and see that there will always be a future, that the most intense pain will eventually pass.
Those are the three things I wish for my two wonderful girls, and I do everything every day to give them those skills!
Of course, if we're talking about popular, salable fiction, the three wishes would be completely different! :-)
I know it's wrong to generalize, certainly not all men are bad. But I do think that women have a much tougher time than guys. I don't want to provoke a battle of the sexes here or sound like an ardent feminist (even though I probably am one!), but women have to be much, much smarter if they want to get ahead. They have to be savvy enough to deal with your average guy's ego and aggression. And if a woman is smart enough to suss that out, then she can usually get what she wants, or at least get by.
As it is, I have three kids, the eldest of which is an eight-year-old boy. While I play games and have fun with both of them, I put more effort into my eldest daughter, because I do believe she'll need to be more switched on when she's older, that she'll have the potential to suffer more if she's not careful.
I suppose we just want to raise our kids in the best way possible, and we can't do that by raising them in a cave. Whatever you think of society (and all the stupid rules it puts on us usually just so a few very rich people can get even richer), if you do take the leap and have kids it's important to equip them for their future properly.
Oh, and don't forget to have fun while you're doing it! :-)
(And yes, I do have the sneaking feeling that I'm the only parent posting here - is that right? Am I the only wrinkly??!!!) :-)
Well, I don't have kids myself, but I have some excellent nieces and nephews, and the lines on my forehead are coming along nicely... This year I shall be thirty. I have decided to get used to it by referring to myself as 'pushing thirty' up until my birthday. Anyone else feel like disclosing their ages?
Well, I'm 40 next week and I want to tell you to enjoy your 30s as much as you can. Lots of things change, but mostly they're for the better. You start trading your youth for a bit more self-confidence (well, I did anyway!)
Ten years ago I also had no kids and a heap of nieces and nephews, and I'm actually on camcorder getting beaten senseless by them and saying that I will never have my own kids! But it's too wonderful an experience not to have: tickling their feet, blowing raspberries on their tummies, and THAT moment when you switch the light off, they put their arms around you and tell you they love you... It just knocks you for six and changes your priorities!
Probably the only feeling that comes close is getting your own publishing contract, but some of us are still waiting for our literary agents to fix that! :-)
1. A sense of humor- to enjoy the best of life, and be able to laugh even in the worst of situations. Also, so they don't feel awkward at parties.Post a Comment
2. The uncanny ability to actually see what they're looking at and listen to what's going on around them.
3. This last one is a toss up between patience and an unbridled sense of curiosity.
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Q: "I am looking for American made load cells. I've had quality control issues with those made in China." Thanks. John
Answer: AmCells, located in California, makes all their loadcells here in the USA. Phone Safe Home Products or LoadCellsUSA.com directly and receive an additional 5% off our low prices. Only Exceptions: 561ST and 561SB. Includes all STL, SSB, DST, DSL, DSS, DSF, T103, SPB and SPM load cells.
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Thanks for your question.
Feel free to contact us if you need more help. We'd need to know the specifics of your application and the load cells you are replacing.
Sincerely, Barbara
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Colleges and universities ranked for campus safety on a scale that accounts for severity of a crime as well as frequency of crime. Campus crime statistics below are per 100 students. To find info about a school not listed below, try the site search at the bottom of the page.
|School Name
|Touro University Nevada
|Touro University California
Incidents per 100 students
Local crime is weighed less than campus crime in a school's overall safety ranking. Each city's safety ranking is based on the same categories that are displayed for crimes that take place on campus.
The campus crime statistics published on StateUniversity.com are compiled from crime reports submitted by college/university law enforcement between January 1 and December 31, 2019. College safety ratings based on campus crime can be a useful tool in evaluating a college or university; however, these safety ratings only provide part of the picture. Before making a college decision based on campus crime reports, students are advised to consider other factors, such as overall crime in the neighboring community. Local organizations and law enforcement may be able to provide such additional information.
You may copy and redistribute this list, both commercially and non-commercialy, so long as it is passed
along unchanged, with credit to StateUniversity.com (either in the form of a hyperlink or a printed URL).
For more information, please see the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License at the Creative Commons website.


text:
Whn the Lights Go Off
I'm ready, I'm ready (yeah!)
I'm ready (what's up?)
I'm ready (what's good?)
I'm ready (you know I'm feelin' real high)
I'm ready
I'm ready (I'm ready)
I'm ready (I'm good)
I'm ready (let's go!)
When the lights (lights) go off (go off)
You're feenin' once you had a chance
That's why I (I) just (just) can't (can't) leave it alone
Oh, oh, oh, oh
Gilla House niggaz! Yo
Hip-Hop has been my callin', ever since that I was crawlin'
E. Sermon start recordin', 9-2 started ballin'
Yeah, whoever woulda knew, a hot man like me survivin'
Recession may have you down, a boy like me keep on ridin'
I, I keep on ridin', New Jersey hold me down
No sense to blame Bin Laden, when the bomb right here in town
Y'all just didn't recognize, but I'm hopin' now you know
Everybody tellin' lies but y'all gonna feel
When the lights, go off
You're feenin' once you had a chance
That's why I (yeah) just (yeah) can't, leave it alone
Oh, oh, oh, oh
Let's get it! Hey, yo
Some rappers say they had it, I feel I'm gettin' started
Got a little bit of change in my hand, Obama's now in office
So "no" is not an option, my heart is pumpin hunger
Your money's dial tone, got it? Wrong number!
I, I need my paper, gotta keep my lights on
I'm buildin' somethin' major, so I can count my acres (yes!)
Better recognize, hip-hop I love it mayne
For the music I will die and y'all gonna feel
Ha ha, yo
My boys said I done it, I told 'em I ain't finished
My skill's Bout It Bout It, but the money, (No Limit)
Gotta keep my nose in it, cause I plan to make a killin'
Instead of sittin' 'round, tryin' to whip, makin' millions
I, I love my job, I, I love my life
If, if God my witness, I feel I did it twice (yes!)
Better recognize, Reggie is goin' forward
Baby when I'm lock and loaded, y'all gonna feel
[Chorus: x2]
Ay, ay, ay, I'm, I'm ready
I'm, I'm ready
I'm, I'm ready (I'm ready)
I'm, I'm ready
I'm, I'm ready, can put the whole world in my hands
Yes sir, let me at you
When the lights go out, and we got a plan
I got one ready, can put the whole world in my hands
If that plan fails, I take another route
I'm always ready, when the lights go out, out, out, out
Believe me I'm always ready
When the lights go ow-ow-ow-ow-ow-ow-out, out, out
Believe me I'm always ready, when the lights go out, out
Watch me, watch me, watch me (yes sir!)
Reggie Noble in the buildin'
(I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready)
Poo Bear on the vocal chords, what's good?
King David on the track, what's happenin' my dude?
(I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready)
Yeah, yeah, signin' off 2025
(I'm ready, I'm ready)
We love you, we love you
(I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready)
(I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready)
Autor(es): REGGIE NOBLE, JASON BOYD, DAVID MANZOOR


text:
A blueprint for high-volume, high-quality lung cancer screening that is detecting cancer earlier—and helping to save lives
Not many people receive congratulatory letters from their health plans about their good cholesterol levels, but some Wisconsin teachers have. Earlier this year, the WEA Trust, which offers health insurance to public school employees, began sending off such notes after evaluating health risk assessments that employees took. This insurer has been following up with mailings detailing how members can keep their cholesterol at healthy levels.
It also offers information and behavioral counseling to people whose scores indicated that they may be at risk for developing a chronic condition. But some would call the idea to cheer on those who scored well — instead of simply ignoring them — revolutionary. It's consistent, though, with the goals of a growing number of insurers that are launching programs to keep their healthiest members healthy. Members who eat well, exercise, and don't smoke are receiving newsletters on how to maintain healthy lifestyles, free visits from health educators, discounts to fitness centers, and access to other programs.
"This is new territory for the insurance industry," says Michael Samuelson, a longtime wellness advocate who is now overseeing health promotion at Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island. The insurer has made a commitment to keeping people well, rather than just paying the bills when they're sick, he says. It is piloting a wellness program that asks everyone, including kids and healthy adults, to participate in classes, activities, and preventive medical care such as screenings — and gives them a discount on premiums for doing so. "What we're hoping for is an increase in utilization of the right kind," he says. "And that is different."
But is all of this a good idea? Health plans exist as a way for people to pool their money so that if they get sick, they'll be taken care of. Plus, as costs for caring for the sick continue to rise, can health plans really afford to spend money on well people? "Giving attention to the healthy would have to pass a fairly high hurdle of rationale, because the ultimate responsibility of a health plan starts with people who are suffering in one way or another," says Jim Sabin, MD, director of the ethics program at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care. "The goal of keeping people healthy is great, but by the principle of triage, health professionals have a primary responsibility to consider and address the people who are suffering from ill health."
"Responsible health plans seek a balance involving comprehensive care for the sick and effective forms of health promotion and disease prevention for the well," says Sabin.
Some of the strongest evidence supporting the idea of focusing on healthy individuals is coming from an old house in Ann Arbor, Mich., that has been converted into the Health Management Research Center of the University of Michigan. There, the center's director, Dee Edington, PhD, and a staff of researchers have been studying employer-based wellness programs for years. What all of the data point to, Edington says, is that investing in a "low-risk maintenance" strategy is the best way to control health care costs.
"It's my mantra, and it's the only way insurance companies can survive," Edington says. "If we do nothing, if we just follow the same pattern and treat one disease after another, we'll continue to pay and pay and pay. So instead of focusing on pulling people out of the water, let's go up and see why they are falling in the water in the first place and see if we can fix those bridges across the stream, so they don't fall in."
Edington doesn't advocate taking money away from treating acutely ill patients. "You can't worry about maintaining low risk when people are having heart attacks," he says, but he adds that spending on other programs should be considered carefully, and health plans should create budgets that allow for spending on low-risk members.
The University of Michigan's research has demonstrated that cost follows risk, which means that if someone has asthma, doesn't exercise, and has a stressful work environment, his annual medical costs will far exceed those of someone who has fewer health risks (see chart on risk factors, and charts on costs, below). That may sound like common sense, but what it means, Edington says, is that organizations should spend at least as much on helping low-risk individuals fight the natural flow into higher-risk categories as they do on bringing high-risk individuals down into lower-risk categories.
"Intuitively people believe that the quickest way to get a return on investment is to go after the high-risk, high-cost people and move them down to lower risk, Edington says. But what we've found is that a better, or at least an equal, solution would be to keep the low-risk people low risk."
Consider that as soon as you cut costs by reducing a person's risk factors, one or more people are likely to move up into that high-risk category, and the cycle starts again, Edington says. And when someone's risk factors are reduced, the costs come down slowly, while costs for people going from low risk to high risk rise much faster, he adds. Plus, as someone moves to a high-risk level, costs go up about $300 per year, Edington says, while costs for someone moving into a low-risk category decrease less than $200 per year, meaning that organizations simply don't save as much money by lowering risks as they do by preventing them in the first place.
The University of Michigan's research, while conducted for and with employers, is relevant to health plans, Edington says. Yet how health plans can best apply the data and the economic models they suggest is still unclear, he admits. "All of the health plans that I work with accept the business case for low-risk maintenance, but now the issue is, how do we do it and what resources should we allocate to it? That's where the challenge is right now."
While Edington argues that at least 50 percent of a health plan's health promotion budget, including funding for disease management programs, should be spent on low-risk maintenance, he says that many programs for healthy people are new, and proof of exactly what works with these populations is still being studied.
Reaching out to healthy people is "a great idea," says Carolyn Clancy, MD, director of the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. "The question is, how efficient or effective is it to provide those services to people who are already doing the right thing and likely to keep doing it anyway? I think that is a question that no one has a really clear answer to."
To create a full-fledged program to target healthy members, a health plan could spend as much as it does for disease management, says Jim Woodburn, MD, corporate medical director for major accounts at Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Minnesota.
Risk can only be determined by giving all members a health risk assessment, for example, which could cost between $5 and $25 per person, a major investment if the Blues plan were to offer it to its 922,000 fully insured members, Woodburn says.
"There's one limiting step to us moving forward, and it's that while there are some good studies in the literature, there are not enough that are broad enough and provide long-term results to really give us great confidence that this investment is going to have a clear return."
The insurer in July planned to launch a new incentive program, for people identified as low risk, that could be purchased by self-insured employers, Woodburn says, but it has not decided whether to roll the program out on the fully insured side.
Spending on healthy people always needs to be balanced against a return on investment (ROI), says Nico Pronk, PhD, vice president for the Center for Health Promotion at HealthPartners and an investigator for the insurer's research foundation. Traditionally, that search for ROI has led insurers to look at disease management programs, because health plans spend the most money on people who are sick, he says.
"As it turns out, though, a lot of the population actually sits at the lower-risk end of the continuum. It doesn't mean that there's no risk, but they are at lower risk. So when you hear that 20 percent of the population incurs 80 percent of the cost, that means that 80 percent of the population only incurs 20 percent of the cost. And if that's the case, wouldn't you want to keep that 80 percent low cost?"
A HealthPartners study on physical activity released last summer confirmed Edington's findings on cost following risk within a health plan population, Pronk says. The insurer studied more than 2,000 members who were 50 or older and found that those who were physically active had the lowest health care costs. In addition, after adjusting for age, gender, comorbidity, smoking status, and body mass index, getting those health plan members to increase their level of physical activity from zero or one time per week to more than three times per week brought their medical costs down by $2,202 per year.
"That's a strong finding," Pronk says. "That kind of impact could actually save Medicare." It also suggests that funding a program to help even healthy people focus on getting more exercise — or keeping up healthy levels of exercise — would be a good investment, he says.
HealthPartners is putting its money into the wellness area because of these and other findings, Pronk says. The insurer offers a Healthy Investment Program to self-insured employers. If an employer that purchases the program gets 80 percent of workers to take a health risk appraisal and participate in programs to lower risks or maintain low-risk status, HealthPartners will reduce the rate the employer is paying overall, meaning it shares the cost of the program with employers, 78 of whom have signed on.
Most health plans are working with specific employers to implement such programs, saying that motivated companies create motivated employees. And because employers typically have employees longer than a health plan keeps the same members, the savings that result from low-risk maintenance strategies — in health care cost reductions and productivity gains — go to employers first, Edington concedes. He believes, however, that if health plans are a part of members' lives when they're healthy, those members will be more likely to re-enroll year after year.
Employers and insurers both consider how long they will be responsible for employees when deciding to fund wellness efforts, says Carolyn Clancy at AHRQ. "If you are an employer whose population turns over relatively often, the benefits of investing in prevention will not be accrued to you. So our challenges in establishing a clear business case for prevention relate to how long an insurer or employer has responsibility for a particular population."
Employers who do hold onto employees for longer periods understand that overall medical spending is about $560 a year for the average person and about $12,000 a year for someone who is chronically ill, says John Harris, founder of Harris HealthTrends, a wellness and disease management company based in Toledo, Ohio. "That is a pretty compelling argument for cost avoidance, rather than cost reduction once people become ill. You've got a lot of eggs in one basket if you're just trying to work with the chronically ill."
As health plans implement programs for their healthy members, they're finding that even low-risk members have some area of improvement they can focus on. "Anyone has things they can improve, even if they're not wearing their seatbelts," says Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Minnesota's Woodburn. "With healthy people, we are trying to provide some incentive program that can help them improve their health status even further."
About 60 percent of Americans have at least two risk factors, because 67 percent of people are overweight or obese, and 60 percent don't exercise, with those two groups overlapping almost 100 percent, says Harris. "There aren't that many Americans who are risk free. It clearly is a minority of the population."
In another random sample, HealthPartners found that just 10 percent of the population is physically active, doesn't smoke, is at normal weight and uses alcohol appropriately, Pronk says.
Risk factors also develop as healthy people age, says Gregg Lehman, PhD, president and CEO of Gordian Health Solutions, a population health management company. "Low-risk people don't stay low risk. Part of the reason they're low risk may be because they're young and have a healthy lifestyle. In many cases, low-risk people will have a genetic predisposition to develop certain risk factors as they age."
But for people who are doing mostly the right things, organizations should provide every kind of resource available to keep them there, Harris says. "It is usually less an issue of trying to change their direction than it is of trying to give them tools and knowledge to stay on the right track." That means putting fitness centers in corporations, providing healthy choices on cafeteria menus, and more, he says. "For years people argued that if you put in a fitness center, only the fit people use it. My reaction is, 'So what? That's great. If you can keep those fit people going there, maybe they won't be unfit 10 years from now.'"
Also available are Web-based programs that teach people how to make minor modifications in their eating, exercise more effectively, and balance their lives better, Harris says. "People who are taking good care of themselves like to keep track of that, so we are seeing a lot of Web sites with trackers that allow people to log their exercise or their calorie consumption."
Taking a broad approach may keep the costs to a minimum, experts say. At WEA Trust the cost for its cholesterol and blood pressure maintenance program for low-risk people included staff time, postage, and purchasing mass quantities of materials, says Renae Sieling, a health educator. The trust is mailing these materials to 50,000 people who took its health risk assessment; others with higher risk were asked to enroll in behavioral change counseling programs to bring their cholesterol and blood pressure into normal ranges.
Just giving healthy people equal time when it comes to programming is much more than has been done in the past, Edington and other experts say.
Low-risk members at the Foundation for a Healthy Community program in Jackson, Mich., receive just as much time with a health educator as high-risk members, says Cindy Bjorkquist, executive director of the foundation, which provides programming to employers through Physicians Health Plan of South Michigan. Both are subsidiaries of Foote Health System.
Four thousand health plan members are part of the program, in which health coaches help people meet the goals outlined in their health risk assessments. "Our coaches visit with or call every single participant three times a year to engage them in a conversation," Bjorkquist says. "Even the healthy people. We call them and we talk to them about what they are doing currently and how they can maintain that."
Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Massachusetts has for years included healthy people in worksite wellness programs. But the insurer is working on a new memberwide strategy to address its healthy population overall, says program manager Gigi Fioravanti. The idea is to help all members reach their optimal health. "We need to shift the way we're viewed. We want to partner with our members to give them the best experience they can possibly get and make the system more affordable. Because until we engage them and become partners with them, we're not going to be able to fight the cost battle. The masses need to get involved in this, because they are the ones utilizing the care, and they will benefit if they can remain healthy."
The ultimate test of whether health plans can succeed will come when health plans ask their members why they have health insurance, Edington says. "Today, members would say, 'So that if I get sick, I have a way to get help.' When we ask members why they have health insurance and they say, 'To help me stay healthy,' that will be when we've won."
A blueprint for high-volume, high-quality lung cancer screening that is detecting cancer earlier—and helping to save lives
ZULRESSO™ (brexanolone) injection CIV
Multiple Sclerosis: New Perspectives on the Patient Journey–2019 Update
Summary of an Actuarial Analysis and Report


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Albert E. Hankins married Bernice Gamble on 1 July 1951 in Spokane, Washington.
I knew my grandmother's brother, Elvie (full name Albert Elvie Hankins), was an insurance salesman in Spokane, Washington. It seemed likely he was the Albert E. Hankins in this marriage certificate from Washington State Digital Archives. This couple was buried in Pines Cemetery in Spokane (according to Interment.net) and Albert's birth date was the right month but a year off Uncle Elvie's 1900 census record birth date. Probably him but I couldn't be sure. Until now.
This marriage license application is another one of those interesting records I found a few weeks ago while browsing database titles at a few sites. It's from the Washington, County Records, 1856–2009 database at FamilySearch.
And there's my answer. This Albert was an insurance salesman and he was born in Dalton, Kentucky. Dalton is the Hopkins County community where Uncle Elvie, my grandmother and most of their siblings were born.by


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Note: This is the 2017–2018 edition of the eCalendar. Update the year in your browser's URL bar for the most recent version of this page, or click here to jump to the newest eCalendar.
Faculty of Arts | Graduate, Undergraduate | Political Science | Fall 2017, Winter 2018, Summer 2018


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Thainstone Collective Sale of Plant, Machinery and Equipment
Saturday 14th November 2020 from 9:00 am
at Thainstone Centre, Inverurie. AB51 5XZ
Auction of Light and Heavy Commercial Vehicles, 4x4's, Excavators, Tractors, Telescopic Handlers, Agricultural Machinery and Equipment, Builders Equipment and Supplies, Engineering and Horticultural, Plant, Equipment and Hand Tools.
To REGISTER and BID at Thainstone Specialist Auctions Online Sales. PLEASE CLICK HERE.
Please Note: Online Bidding Avaialble Only For for Light and Heavy Commercial Vehicles, 4x4's, Excavators, Tractors, Telescopic Handlers, Small Plant and Groundcare Equipment.
View our current Buying/Selling fees
Current Lots IncludeMore information to follow.
All of the Above Entries Listed Subject to Arrival
View our current Buying/Selling fees
EntriesAll Goods accepted during the week of sale Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. 8.00am till 8.00pm
NOTE: Only tractors, mobile plant, light & heavy commercial vehicles and 4x4 entries accepted on Friday 9am-5pm.
No other goods accepted on Friday.
Strictly no intake on Saturday. Sale will start at 9.00am
Electrical Safety Portable Appliance TestAll mains powered electrical items are subject to an Electrical Safety Portable Appliance Test (Charged at £1.00 + VAT per item)
Goods failing to pass the Electrical Safety Portable Appliance Test will not be entered into sale and must be removed.
Viewing Times
Friday 9am to 5pm and morning of sale from 8am
Note: Exchange Hall from 3.30pm or immediately after set-up until 8.00pm
Sale Itinerary
- Yard - Small plant machinery and equipment, ground care equipment, followed by heavy plant equipment including tractors, vans and 4x4s. (Online bidding available)
- Top Yard - Builders Equipment
- Exchange Hall - Engineering, workshop and horticultural equipment
- Ring 3 - Hand tools
- Top Yard - Implements
- Top Yard - Livestock handling equipment
- Yard - Plant machinery and equipment, trailers, followed by caravans, livestock trailers and containers
- Yard - HGVs and HGV trailers (Online bidding available)
CollectionFollowing the sale, collection can be made at the following times:
Monday to Wednesday 8.00am – 8.00pm
Thursday 8.00am – 5.00pm
Thereafter by arrangement only by phoning 01467 623710 or 623770.
Notice to all EU buyersPlease note that HMRC are enforcing standard VAT on all purchases made in the UK until adequate proof of goods being exported is provided. Please download our guide for further information.
All buyers welcome
DocumentsVehicle Entry Form Implement Entry Form
Subscribe to our mailing listClick here to sign up for our mailing list to receive information based on your interests.
Key Contacts
Plant, Machinery, Tractors, 4x4's, Light & Heavy Commercials
Name: John Roy
Title: Vehicle and Machinery Sales Manager
Tel: 01467 623863
Mobile: 07831 807841
Email: email@example.com
Name: Allan Finn
Title: Vehicle and Machinery Auction Co-ordinator
Tel: 01467 623864
Mobile: 07341 088058
Email: firstname.lastname@example.com
Agricultural Implements & Machinery
Name: Tim McDonald F.I.A. (Scot.)
Title: Prime & Cull Cattle Manager
Mobile: 07507 651069
Email: firstname.lastname@example.com