With Delicious Results for All!

Indeed, things are a-brewing, on multiple fronts.

Stay tuned.

Matt Stuart

Matt Stuart shoots photos of visual puns and coincidences.

See here.

UPDATE: I forgot to include HOW to actually view the pics. After you click on one ("colour," "black & white" or "commissioned"), hit the left/right arrows on your keyboard to see more within that category.

Via Kottke

"Why NBA Television Programming Sucks: Q&A With Sports Media Watch " (Hardwood Paroxysm)

We've made our hatred of the way NBA National Television Programming is set up pretty obvious. But we wanted to get some answers to our questions. We did a brief Q&A with Paulsen from Sports Media Watch, a fantastic site for covering everything media related in sports.

Hey, *I* learned things, but that's not saying much. It explains a bunch of issues about why the NBA scheduling sucks, especially given the flexibility allotted to some networks; plus, some interesting thoughts on what the Turner (TNT) /NBA TV deal could mean for our broadcasting.

Read It Here.

Happy MLK Day!

Mouneer Al-Shaarani

Gorgeous calligraphy. It's not all the same style; click the right/left arrows.

Gallery

Lost Art's 2007 (and 2006) Year in Pictures

Self explanatory.

WARNING: Nudity.

Watch 2007 Here

I enjoyed the pictures towards the middle/end more than the ones near the beginning. It's renewed my convictions to visit:
- Brazil (specifically for the graffiti)
- Italy
- Spain

And since I never put it up, apparently, check out Lost Art's 2006 Year In Pictures as well. Made Egypt a MUST VISIT location. Jordan (in general) and Prague seem notable.

(Apparently, when I first posted, I was a little behind the times)

"MN Health System Purges Its Hospitals and Clinics of Drug Company Trinkets"

Farah approved.

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) -- When a Duluth-based operator of hospitals and clinics purged the pens, notepads, coffee mugs and other promotional trinkets drug companies had given its doctors over the years, it took 20 shopping carts to haul the loot away.

The operator, SMDC Health System, intends to ship the 18,718 items to the west African nation of Cameroon.

The purge underscored SMDC's decision to join the growing movement to ban gifts to doctors from drug companies.

"I've never seen nor heard of a systematic roundup of pens and coffee mugs before," Johnson said. "It's a bit draconian. But the onus is on us now to do a better job of explaining the job and the importance of marketing representatives. Unfortunately there are a lot of cynics in America who want to think the worst."


SDMC's effort was motivated by a desire to show patients that its 450 doctors were serious about keeping prescription drug costs down and making unbiased medical decisions, Irons said.

The backlash against the cozy relationships between doctors and drug makers gained steam from article in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2006. It said research had shown that even cheap gifts, such as pens, can affect doctors' prescribing decisions.

Send A Message in Palestine

I love this idea. love love love.

Have you ever wanted to travel to Palestine just to write a message of love in graffiti for your sweetie? Or perhaps you wanted to tell that buddy of yours that he owes you $20 bucks and just wanted it to be visible on something as divisive as a wall to illustrate the rift the debt has caused between the two of you? Well now you can do both of those. At Send A Message you pay and Palestinians Spray! For a mere 30 Euros, you can have your message of love or debt collection spray painted on this 620 Kilometer fence (click here for image). In return, you get 3 digital photos to share with those who the message is aimed at.

All kidding aside, the wall is a great project, a collaboration between Dutch advertising professionals and creative Palestinian youth, each message posted reminds Palestinians trapped inside the Wall they have not been forgotten, helping to keep hope alive. The project also allows those inside those wall to send one single, simple message: “we are human beings, just like you, with sense of humor and lust for life.” That’s why they do this, and enjoy it.

The only concern I can think of at the moment is for the security of those who actually participate in the vandalism.

Send a Message from Here

Via Josh Spear

Conan's Strike Diary

Very amusing, short (4 very short pages), and worth the read.

Check it out.

Mmm Bookshelves

So pretty.

Via Visual Dhikr.

"Rich Kid Syndrome" By Jennifer Senior

"America’s burgeoning money culture is producing a record number of heirs—but handing down values is harder than handing down wealth."

Interesting, albeit a bit obvious. I wish they'd given more advice to the kids of rich kids (hi) on how not to eff up. But at least this way I can continue to blame everything on my parents?

Article.

Highlights:

Recently, I phoned Andrew Solomon, heir to a substantial pharmaceutical fortune and author of the beautiful depression memoir The Noonday Demon, and asked if he’d discuss the psychological effects of inherited wealth. In the most gracious way, he declined. I pointed out that in his book, he was willing to talk about a depression so profound he attempted to contract HIV in order to have a reason to kill himself; yet he was too shy, on the phone, to talk about his inheritance. Why was that?

He thought a moment before replying. “Because I think talking about money causes people not to take you seriously when talking about other things,” he said.

In 2000, there were 7,000 American households worth $100 million or more; in 2003, there were 10,000; and today, though the data isn’t yet in, Boston College estimates that the number will be 14,000 or 15,000, or double what it was at the beginning of the millennium. If you pare back the standard from eight zeroes to seven, the numbers are even more surprising: Boston College has calculated that in 2004, the last time the Fed provided data, there were 649,000 American households worth $10 million or more, a nearly 300 percent jump since 1992.

By 2004, he notes, the richest one percent of Americans were earning more than the total national income of France or Italy.

Yet the newly rich inevitably discover that it’s very hard to have your cake and eat it while raising healthy, hardworking children. “I just met this morning with a very sharp 48-year-old,” says Charles Collier, author of Wealth in Families and senior philanthropic adviser at Harvard University. “And he said to me, ‘I don’t want my children to be entitled, but I want to have a jet. I came from nothing. Haven’t I earned my jet?’”

And perhaps this fellow has earned his jet. But his children haven’t. The problem with money, as he doubtless discovered, is that it sets up its own paradox: Hard work may yield it, but growing up with it often discourages hard work. The aphorism “Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations,” commonly attributed to Andrew Carnegie, has proved prophetically true not just here but across cultures

It means helping families cope with the many psychological distortions—and moral questions, responsibilities, and obligations—that come from having lots of money. Just as poverty produces its own pathologies, so too does inherited wealth.

“We are not just talking about the children of multimillionaires and billionaires who have to worry about the effects of money,” says Suniya Luthar, a psychologist at Columbia Teachers College. “Think of any white-collar professionals who want their children to lead the same lifestyles and have the same opportunities that they have themselves. The critical question is how to strive for those things while also striving for their equanimity as human beings. And that’s often harder than it seems.”

In a sample of 314 tenth-graders in a wealthy suburban community, the rate of “clinically significant anxiety” was 5 to 9 percent higher than the national average, and among girls, the rate of “clinically significant depression” was three times the national norm. Drug use exceeded not just national averages but that of low-income high-school kids she followed in a parallel study. In part, she says, it’s because so many children of the wealthy are overworked, trying to live up to their parents’ high standards, or at least to take full advantage of the extraordinary possibilities laid out before them. But in part, she adds, it’s because some wealthy children are underworked, not held to responsibilities and obligations, and therefore suffering from a certain crisis of utility, of agency—they’ve never had to do anything for themselves.

Then what, I ask Stratyner, do the most distressed rich kids fantasize about when it comes to their family money? That they didn’t have it?

“Rarely,” he answers. “They’re not stupid.”

Having less?

“No, not really.”

So what, then?

He thinks for a long moment, then finally gives an answer. “That they’d made it themselves.”

George Vaillant, a Harvard psychiatrist who’s spent the bulk of his career devoted to the study of adult resilience and coping, argued that childhood capacity for work is one of the best predictors of adult mental health and the capacity to love.

...


Those who demonstrated the greatest capacity for work as 14-year-olds were five times more likely to be paid well for their work at 47 than those who scored lowest, and sixteen times less likely to have experienced unemployment—and intelligence, Vaillant was careful to note, did little to mediate the latter outcomes. They were also twice as likely to have warm relations with a wide variety of people and almost twice as likely to still be enjoying their first marriages. But perhaps the most striking datum was what Vaillant wryly called a “value-free definition of health”: Those who had the poorest ratings were six times as likely, at age 47, to be dead.

But here’s a question: How do you drum a work ethic into those who, strictly speaking, don’t have to work?

Most advisers to wealthy families have a simple answer to this: You make sure that the kids do have to work. You give them chores. You insist on summer jobs. You restrain their spending with allowances. And above all, no matter what, you keep the children’s trusts out of their hands until they’re at least 35, unless they need health insurance, more education, a down payment on a house, or seed money for a decent business idea.

Let’s say you’re a normal person with a normal income and struggles,” says Tommy Gallagher of Tiger 21. He’s the Crown Heights–born son of a toll collector and school crossing guard and, as such, still looks at his money a bit as an outsider would. “You have a child,” he continues, “and that child decides to do something. You’re going to try to help them in a way you can help them. But I can really help my child if he wants to do something. I can pay his rent. I can buy a house for him. I can enable him forever. And that’s really tempting.”

“The funny thing is,” he adds, reflecting on it, “if you’re sitting around with the members at Tiger, four or five of them will always say, ‘The most important thing I ever learned in my life is, when I fell down, I could get up.’ And that’s one of the things you’re taking away from these kids. We don’t let them fall down.”

The uglier face of this protective instinct, of course, is wanting to control every aspect of your child’s life—limiting their pursuits, trying to mold them into Mini-Mes. Again, it’s an urge that most parents have, whether they’re rich or poor—seeing their own children as extensions of themselves, fighting their own vanity in order to allow their kids to become who they’re supposed to become. But wealth tests this instinct to the breaking point.

“When I was active,” says Jay Hughes, a retired estate planner who wrote Family Wealth and Family: The Compact Among Generations, “one of the things that happened almost every time I was working with a new family is that they’d all start out by saying work was critical. But every single time, they’d also say, ‘Well, we can’t have anyone in this family become a surfer.’ And I’d say, ‘Well, what if they had a life-goal to win the medal at Waikiki?’ Because if you found the journey of your family on the premise of your child dreaming your dream, you’re founding it on a fallacy.”

“But at some point in time,” he says, “you make an evaluation of your kid, and how they treat money, and how respectful they are of other people, and how generous they are. Me, I’m lucky. I have plenty of issues with my kids, but them taking advantage of me? Or wanting more than they should? No. One’s in the military and has been for ten years. And the other one’s a communist, a self-hating rich kid.” He thinks. “Of course, he’s a self-hating rich kid who’s been to Cuba, India, and China—twice. Who the hell paid for all this stuff?” Then he stops himself, realizing that perhaps this boy deserves more credit than he’s giving him. “I want to walk down Madison Avenue and have people think I’m a super in one of their buildings,” says Gallagher. “But my son, he always says, ‘Dad, they’re going to look at your watch and they’re going to know you’re rich.’”

The Weiner Circle

This is a clip I cut out from the awesome TV show on Showtime, "This American Life." The clip is about the Wiener Circle, a hot dog joint that any college-age person in Chicago unavoidably knows about. This is a brief look behind the scenes.

Amusing at first, but then branches off into "really frigging messed up / will help you lose faith in the world."

WARNING: Excessive vulgarity / racial issues.

Video

Typolution

Film d'animation typographique minimaliste à saveur environnementale, rythmé par la chanson «Nostrand» du groupe Ratatat réalisé par Olivier Beaudoin, designer graphique;
http://www.kalomnie.ca
«Diplôme d'Or» - Écodesign 2007 de St-Pétersbourg

... I don't know what that means. I see "animation blah blah typography, blah blah, environmental, blah blah watch this and STFU."

So do that.

"The Checklist" by Atul Gawande (The New Yorker)

Lengthy highlights for a simple concept article. Irony? Check.

Article

Highlights:

Consider a case report in The Annals of Thoracic Surgery of a three-year-old girl who fell into an icy fishpond in a small Austrian town in the Alps. She was lost beneath the surface for thirty minutes before her parents found her on the pond bottom and pulled her up. Following instructions from an emergency physician on the phone, they began cardiopulmonary resuscitation. A rescue team arrived eight minutes later. The girl had a body temperature of sixty-six degrees, and no pulse. Her pupils were dilated and did not react to light, indicating that her brain was no longer working.

But the emergency technicians continued CPR anyway. A helicopter took her to a nearby hospital, where she was wheeled directly to an operating room. A surgical team put her on a heart-lung bypass machine. Between the transport time and the time it took to plug the inflow and outflow lines into the femoral vessels of her right leg, she had been lifeless for an hour and a half. By the two-hour mark, however, her body temperature had risen almost ten degrees, and her heart began to beat. It was her first organ to come back.

After six hours, her core temperature reached 98.6 degrees. The team tried to put her on a breathing machine, but the pond water had damaged her lungs too severely for oxygen to reach her blood. So they switched her to an artificial-lung system known as ECMO—extracorporeal membrane oxygenation. The surgeons opened her chest down the middle with a power saw and sewed lines to and from the ECMO unit into her aorta and her beating heart. The team moved the girl into intensive care, with her chest still open and covered with plastic foil. A day later, her lungs had recovered sufficiently for the team to switch her from ECMO to a mechanical ventilator and close her chest. Over the next two days, all her organs recovered except her brain. A CT scan showed global brain swelling, which is a sign of diffuse damage, but no actual dead zones. So the team drilled a hole into the girl’s skull, threaded in a probe to monitor her cerebral pressure, and kept that pressure tightly controlled by constantly adjusting her fluids and medications. For more than a week, she lay comatose. Then, slowly, she came back to life.

First, her pupils started to react to light. Next, she began to breathe on her own. And, one day, she simply awoke. Two weeks after her accident, she went home. Her right leg and left arm were partially paralyzed. Her speech was thick and slurry. But by age five, after extensive outpatient therapy, she had recovered her faculties completely. She was like any little girl again.

A decade ago, Israeli scientists published a study in which engineers observed patient care in I.C.U.s for twenty-four-hour stretches. They found that the average patient required a hundred and seventy-eight individual actions per day, ranging from administering a drug to suctioning the lungs, and every one of them posed risks. Remarkably, the nurses and doctors were observed to make an error in just one per cent of these actions—but that still amounted to an average of two errors a day with every patient. Intensive care succeeds only when we hold the odds of doing harm low enough for the odds of doing good to prevail.

This is the reality of intensive care: at any point, we are as apt to harm as we are to heal. Line infections are so common that they are considered a routine complication. I.C.U.s put five million lines into patients each year, and national statistics show that, after ten days, four per cent of those lines become infected. Line infections occur in eighty thousand people a year in the United States, and are fatal between five and twenty-eight per cent of the time, depending on how sick one is at the start. Those who survive line infections spend on average a week longer in intensive care. And this is just one of many risks. After ten days with a urinary catheter, four per cent of American I.C.U. patients develop a bladder infection. After ten days on a ventilator, six per cent develop bacterial pneumonia, resulting in death forty to fifty-five per cent of the time. All in all, about half of I.C.U. patients end up experiencing a serious complication, and, once a complication occurs, the chances of survival drop sharply.

Here, then, is the puzzle of I.C.U. care: you have a desperately sick patient, and in order to have a chance of saving him you have to make sure that a hundred and seventy-eight daily tasks are done right—despite some monitor's alarm going off for God knows what reason, despite the patient in the next bed crashing, despite a nurse poking his head around the curtain to ask whether someone could help "get this lady's chest open." So how do you actually manage all this complexity? The solution that the medical profession has favored is specialization.

Expertise is the mantra of modern medicine. In the early twentieth century, you needed only a high-school diploma and a one-year medical degree to practice medicine. By the century's end, all doctors had to have a college degree, a four-year medical degree, and an additional three to seven years of residency training in an individual field of practice—pediatrics, surgery, neurology, or the like. Already, though, this level of preparation has seemed inadequate to the new complexity of medicine. After their residencies, most young doctors today are going on to do fellowships, adding one to three further years of training in, say, laparoscopic surgery, or pediatric metabolic disorders, or breast radiology—or critical care. A young doctor is not so young nowadays; you typically don't start in independent practice until your mid-thirties.

Expertise is the mantra of modern medicine. In the early twentieth century, you needed only a high-school diploma and a one-year medical degree to practice medicine. By the century's end, all doctors had to have a college degree, a four-year medical degree, and an additional three to seven years of residency training in an individual field of practice—pediatrics, surgery, neurology, or the like. Already, though, this level of preparation has seemed inadequate to the new complexity of medicine. After their residencies, most young doctors today are going on to do fellowships, adding one to three further years of training in, say, laparoscopic surgery, or pediatric metabolic disorders, or breast radiology—or critical care. A young doctor is not so young nowadays; you typically don't start in independent practice until your mid-thirties.

In 2001, though, a critical-care specialist at Johns Hopkins Hospital named Peter Pronovost decided to give it a try. He didn't attempt to make the checklist cover everything; he designed it to tackle just one problem, the one that nearly killed Anthony DeFilippo: line infections. On a sheet of plain paper, he plotted out the steps to take in order to avoid infections when putting a line in.

These [5] steps are no-brainers; they have been known and taught for years. So it seemed silly to make a checklist just for them. Still, Pronovost asked the nurses in his I.C.U. to observe the doctors for a month as they put lines into patients, and record how often they completed each step. In more than a third of patients, they skipped at least one.

The next month, he and his team persuaded the hospital administration to authorize nurses to stop doctors if they saw them skipping a step on the checklist; nurses were also to ask them each day whether any lines ought to be removed, so as not to leave them in longer than necessary. This was revolutionary.

The new rule made it clear: if doctors didn't follow every step on the checklist, the nurses would have backup from the administration to intervene.

Pronovost and his colleagues monitored what happened for a year afterward. The results were so dramatic that they weren't sure whether to believe them: the ten-day line-infection rate went from eleven per cent to zero. So they followed patients for fifteen more months. Only two line infections occurred during the entire period. They calculated that, in this one hospital, the checklist had prevented forty-three infections and eight deaths, and saved two million dollars in costs.

The researchers found that simply having the doctors and nurses in the I.C.U. make their own checklists for what they thought should be done each day improved the consistency of care to the point that, within a few weeks, the average length of patient stay in intensive care dropped by half.

The checklists provided two main benefits, Pronovost observed. First, they helped with memory recall, especially with mundane matters that are easily overlooked in patients undergoing more drastic events.

...

A second effect was to make explicit the minimum, expected steps in complex processes. Pronovost was surprised to discover how often even experienced personnel failed to grasp the importance of certain precautions.

...

Checklists established a higher standard of baseline performance.

For his doctoral thesis, he examined intensive-care units in Maryland, and he discovered that putting an intensivist on staff reduced death rates by a third. It was the first time that someone had demonstrated the public-health value of using intensivists. He wasn't satisfied with having proved his case, though; he wanted hospitals to change accordingly. After his study was published, in 1999, he met with a coalition of large employers known as the Leapfrog Group. It included companies like General Motors and Verizon, which were seeking to improve the standards of hospitals where their employees obtain care. Within weeks, the coalition announced that its members expected the hospitals they contracted with to staff their I.C.U.s with intensivists. These employers pay for health care for thirty-seven million employees, retirees, and dependents nationwide. So although hospitals protested that there weren't enough intensivists to go around, and that the cost could be prohibitive, Pronovost's idea effectively became an instant national standard.

The scientist in him has always made room for the campaigner. People say he is the kind of guy who, even as a trainee, could make you feel you'd saved the world every time you washed your hands properly.

In 2003, however, the Michigan Health and Hospital Association asked Pronovost to try out three of his checklists in Michigan's I.C.U.s.

...

Sinai-Grace is a classic urban hospital. It has eight hundred physicians, seven hundred nurses, and two thousand other medical personnel to care for a population with the lowest median income of any city in the country. More than a quarter of a million residents are uninsured; three hundred thousand are on state assistance. That has meant chronic financial problems. Sinai-Grace is not the most cash-strapped hospital in the city—that would be Detroit Receiving Hospital, where a fifth of the patients have no means of payment. But between 2000 and 2003 Sinai-Grace and eight other Detroit hospitals were forced to cut a third of their staff, and the state had to come forward with a fifty-million-dollar bailout to avert their bankruptcy.

...

Meanwhile, the teams faced an even heavier workload because of new rules limiting how long the residents could work at a stretch. Now Pronovost was telling them to find the time to fill out some daily checklists?

Tom Piskorowski, one of the I.C.U. physicians, told me his reaction: "Forget the paperwork. Take care of the patient."

Pronovost had been canny when he started. In his first conversations with hospital administrators, he didn't order them to use the checklists. Instead, he asked them simply to gather data on their own infection rates. In early 2004, they found, the infection rates for I.C.U. patients in Michigan hospitals were higher than the national average, and in some hospitals dramatically so. Sinai-Grace experienced more line infections than seventy-five per cent of American hospitals. Meanwhile, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan agreed to give hospitals small bonus payments for participating in Pronovost's program. A checklist suddenly seemed an easy and logical thing to try.

In December, 2006, the Keystone Initiative published its findings in a landmark article in The New England Journal of Medicine. Within the first three months of the project, the infection rate in Michigan's I.C.U.s decreased by sixty-six per cent. The typical I.C.U.—including the ones at Sinai-Grace Hospital—cut its quarterly infection rate to zero. Michigan's infection rates fell so low that its average I.C.U. outperformed ninety per cent of I.C.U.s nationwide. In the Keystone Initiative's first eighteen months, the hospitals saved an estimated hundred and seventy-five million dollars in costs and more than fifteen hundred lives. The successes have been sustained for almost four years—all because of a stupid little checklist.

Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff" tells the story of our first astronauts, and charts the demise of the maverick, Chuck Yeager test-pilot culture of the nineteen-fifties. It was a culture defined by how unbelievably dangerous the job was. Test pilots strapped themselves into machines of barely controlled power and complexity, and a quarter of them were killed on the job. The pilots had to have focus, daring, wits, and an ability to improvise—the right stuff. But as knowledge of how to control the risks of flying accumulated—as checklists and flight simulators became more prevalent and sophisticated—the danger diminished, values of safety and conscientiousness prevailed, and the rock-star status of the test pilots was gone.

Something like this is going on in medicine. We have the means to make some of the most complex and dangerous work we do—in surgery, emergency care, and I.C.U. medicine—more effective than we ever thought possible. But the prospect pushes against the traditional culture of medicine, with its central belief that in situations of high risk and complexity what you want is a kind of expert audacity—the right stuff, again. Checklists and standard operating procedures feel like exactly the opposite, and that's what rankles many people.

Pronovost remains, in a way, an odd bird in medical research. He does not have the multimillion-dollar grants that his colleagues in bench science have. He has no swarm of doctoral students and lab animals. He's focussed on work that is not normally considered a significant contribution in academic medicine. As a result, few other researchers are venturing to extend his achievements. Yet his work has already saved more lives than that of any laboratory scientist in the past decade.

I called Pronovost recently at Johns Hopkins, where he was on duty in an I.C.U. I asked him how long it would be before the average doctor or nurse is as apt to have a checklist in hand as a stethoscope (which, unlike checklists, has never been proved to make a difference to patient care).

"At the current rate, it will never happen," he said, as monitors beeped in the background. "The fundamental problem with the quality of American medicine is that we've failed to view delivery of health care as a science. The tasks of medical science fall into three buckets. One is understanding disease biology. One is finding effective therapies. And one is insuring those therapies are delivered effectively. That third bucket has been almost totally ignored by research funders, government, and academia. It's viewed as the art of medicine. That's a mistake, a huge mistake. And from a taxpayer's perspective it's outrageous ."

I asked him how much it would cost for him to do for the whole country what he did for Michigan. About two million dollars, he said, maybe three.

He's already devised a plan to do it in all of Spain for less.

"We could get I.C.U. checklists in use throughout the United States within two years, if the country wanted it," he said.

So far, it seems, we don't. The United States could have been the first to adopt medical checklists nationwide, but, instead, Spain will beat us. "I at least hope we're not the last," Pronovost said.

Night at the Starbury

Life imitates art imitates life?

"Mercy: The Stamp of Creation" by Dr. Umar Faruq Abd-Allah (Nawawi Foundation)

On a mission to read all the articles from The Nawawi Foundation's Reading Room. It'll probably take me a while, and I'll honestly probably only highlight this article, as it's the shortest (and notice how the highlights go on for miles).

"Mercy: The Stamp of Creation" by Dr. Umar Faruq Abd-Allah

Highlights:

From a theological perspective, however, it would be more precise to describe Islam as the religion of mercy. Islamic revelation designates the Prophet Mu^ammad as “the prophet of mercy,” and Islam’s scriptural sources stress that mercy—above other divine attributions—is God’s hallmark in creation and constitutes his primary relation to the world from its inception through eternity, in this world and the next.

--

In Islam, the All-Merciful (ar-Rahman) and the Mercy-Giving (ar-Rahim) may be said to be the greatest names of God after Allah. Of all his names, they are most descriptive of his relation to the world and emphasize his will in salvation history and throughout eternity to benefit creation and ultimately bring about the triumph of
supreme good over evil.

--

Consequently, mercy is the stamp of creation and the ontological thread that runs through everything. All that transpires—even temporal deprivation, harm, and
evil—will, in due course, fall under the rubric of cosmic mercy.

--

Because we live in a universe bearing mercy’s imprint, harmony and beauty permeate
all things: “Our Lord, you have embraced all things in mercy and knowledge.”6 In the verse, mercy—technically an attribute of act—is given priority of reference over knowledge—an attribute of essence—again emphasizing mercy’s predominance in the universal plan.

--

Theologically, Islamic tradition defines mercy as the intent to bring good to
others and cause them benefit.

...

But as it relates to the intent to bring about good or avert evil, mercy assumes
an elemental and proactive dimension and is often before the fact, evincing a forward-looking quality that seeks to set things right, make a break with the
past, and foster new beginnings where goodness and benefit can thrive.

--

[The Prophet) did not restrict his mercy to his followers. One day in Medina, he was sitting with his Companions, who later related: “A funeral procession passed us by, and the Prophet, may God bless and keep him, stood up so we all stood up because he had. Then we said: "O Messenger of God, it is only the funeral procession of a Jew.’ He replied: ‘Was he not a human being?’”

--

That same attitude combined with masterly statesmanship enabled him not only to rescue the city of Medina — which had invited him for that purpose—from generations
of civil war between its feuding clans but to create an island of stability in a sea of chaos and then extend that island gradually until it claimed the sea.

--

Those who died in the Prophet’s battles were relatively few, and, according to some estimates, numbered around two hundred on both sides. He laid down rules of engagement and parameters of war that became a central part of Islamic law, forbidding the predation of civilian populations, the wanton destruction of lands and livestock, and the use of fire, flooding, and poisons that kill indiscriminately.
The Prophet accepted people at their word and forgave them easily. He harbored no desire for vengeance and rejected the pagan custom of blood feuds and revenge. There was nothing mindless or fanatic about his piety. He was never intransigent or
bent on war. Men who had been numbered among his most relentless and unforgiving enemies—like Abu Sufyan ibn Harb, 'Ikrima ibn Abi Jahl, and Safwan ibn Umayya—ultimately came not only to accept and follow the Prophet but, during the last years of their lives, devoted themselves heroically to his mission with a passion
surpassing the enmity that had driven them before.

--

In imitation of the Prophet, Muslims are expected to be merciful, to bring good, and to seek the benefi t of others—all others—not wish them harm or rejoice in the evil that befalls them. Indeed, the Tradition of Primacy promotes a doctrine of universal,
all-embracing mercy. Commentators emphasize this point, clarifying that the mercy Muslims are commanded to show is not exclusively for themselves or the righteous amongst them. It extends to all human beings: Jews, Christians, the believing and unbelieving, the upright and the immoral, and it goes beyond the human family to include both the animate and inanimate: birds and animals, even plants and trees. In English, “be merciful to those on earth” tends to imply human beings. Translated here as “those,” the Arabic word man is broad and inclusive. Its primary reference is
to rational beings, but it includes, by secondary reference, non-rational ones
also: animals, plants, and, by extension, what today would be termed the environment.

--

Mercy begins with the individual by taking care of the self physically, emotionally, and spiritually and includes exercise and diet, pursuing education, and keeping good company.

--

From the individual, concentric rings of mercy extend outward, taking in parents, spouse, children, family, neighbors, community, and the world. Part of being merciful toward others is having a good opinion of them, defending their good name, and doing whatever makes their lives better and averts harm.

--

As discussed at the beginning of this essay and as the Traditions above concerning kindness to animals indicate, mercy—God’s signature in creation—is linked to a law of universal reciprocity: Mercy will be shown to the merciful, and it will be withdrawn from the merciless. The positive side of this universal law is reflected in the words of the Tradition of Primacy: “Be merciful to those on earth, and he who is in heaven will be merciful to you,” a lesson often repeated in the Islamic scriptures. The
Prophet taught: “Truly, God only shows mercy to those of his servants who are themselves merciful.”12 Here the complementary side of the law of mercy is clarified. The Prophet said elsewhere: “Whoever shows no mercy will be shown no mercy.”13 In the
same authoritative collections, we find: “God will show no mercy to those who show no mercy to humankind.”14 The Prophet warned his community: “Being merciful is only stripped away from the damned,”15 implying that mercy is the natural condition of the human soul and is only stripped away and exchanged for mercilessness in people with callous, unnatural hearts that can no longer receive it. A heart that no longer has the capacity to feel mercy cannot be a receptacle of salvation either or a container of true faith; to become ruthless and void of compassion is to carry the mark of divine wrath and bear the brand of damnation and is the sure sign of an evil end.

Thus, the reciprocity inherent in the universal law of mercy embodies another dimension: the fact that mercy is linked with faith and opens the door of salvation, while mercilessness is linked with the rejection of God and invites damnation. Classical commentators explain that mercy springs from a healthy heart, one that is spiritually alive and suitable for sincere faith. Utter lack of mercy, on the other hand, reflects a heart that is spiritually dead. The implications are profound: Mercy and true belief do not cohabit hearts where hatred and the utter disregard for others reign.

--

The imperative to be merciful—to bring benefit to the world and avert harm—must underlie a Muslim’s understanding of reality and attitude toward society. Islam was not intended to create a chosen people, fostering exclusive claims for themselves,
while looking down upon the rest of humanity like a sea of untouchables or regarding the animate and inanimate worlds around them as fields readied for wanton exploitation. Wherever Muslims find themselves, they are called upon to be actively
and positively engaged as vanguards of mercy, welfare, and well-being.

--

The merciless heart abides in the spirit of the damned, while the healthy heart
is instinctively humane and comprehends the pricelessness of mercy.

"The Top Ten Stories You Missed in 2007" from ForeignPolicy.com

You know, I had a clue about a thing or two that happened in 2006, but this year, I got nothing. Craziness.

Top 10 Stories you (and I) missed in 2007.

Chris Farley's sports skits and other classics

Ah, Chris Farley. How we miss you.

I do kinda wish there were more "In a Van Down by the River" skits featured, though it probably didn't fit the theme. Regardless, I was a fan.

Via 100% Injury Rate

"A Land Called Paradise" Video

:)

In December 2007, over 2,000 American Muslims were asked what they wished they could say to the world. This is what they said.

Unofficial music video for Kareem Salama's "A Land Called Paradise."

http://www.linktv.org/onenation/films...
This video has been submitted to the Link TV One Nation One Voice contest. Please support it by voting.

Produced and directed by Lena Khan. A MAS Media Foundation Production.

Brought to you by Mas Media Foundation, Inland Empire.