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Want to buy a home? A down payment is just the beginning
If you're saving for your first home, there's no shortage of advice out there — some of it questionable, even if you do have an avocado toast habit. Still, it's true that your down payment may be the biggest check you ever write.
But once you move in, it's also true that the cash tends to just keep flying out of your bank account like that money-with-wings emoji. If you drain your savings on closing day, you'll have to delay furnishings or repairs, to say nothing of less-pressing cosmetic changes.
A sizable cash cushion makes the cost of owning a home more manageable. But even if you lack that cushion, it helps to at least know what to expect and what else you may need to finance or start saving for again. Here's what I learned.
1. Things will break
I've lost count of the handymen, electricians and plumbers who have paraded through the home my husband and I bought in October 2019. As I type this, our dryer is being repaired for the second time since we moved in. All told, we've spent around $1,300 on small fixes.
Repairing issues yourself is cost-effective, but only if you know what you're doing. If a repair involves dangerous work, or you lack the skills and equipment to do it safely and correctly, hire a licensed and insured professional.
What should you do?
Pay close attention to the home inspection. "Leaking roofs, mold, electrical and plumbing issues are the mostly commonly noted concerns on an inspection report," says Day Coker, owner of AC by Day C, an HVAC maintenance and repair company based in High Point, North Carolina. If the inspection turns up issues, negotiate with the seller to either repair them or lower the selling price.
Find out the age of major appliances. When you can estimate how many years an appliance has left, you can save up for its replacement.
Create a repair fund. Aim to save around $5,000, says Chelsea Lipford Wolf, co-host of the "Today's Homeowner" TV show and creator of "Checking In With Chelsea," a home improvement blog and video series. "That would cover most home systems that you would need to repair to keep your house running."
2. You'll want to make your house a home
As a renter, you may have put up with lumpy sofas or rickety chairs, thinking eventually you'd have "real" furniture in your own home like the kind you see at a carefully staged open house. But you're purchasing a structure; the furnishings typically don't come with it.
We spent around $8,000 on furniture this year.
Another sneaky expense? Smaller accessories like towel racks, shower curtains, shelves, and storage bins that make a space functional.
What should you do?
Save on furniture and decor. Brand-new, solid wood furniture is expensive, but antiques are well-constructed and can be had for a fraction of the price. Between antique stores, estate sales and Craigslist, we spent less to score high-quality pieces.
Do the small stuff yourself. When in doubt, watch a tutorial on YouTube or ask for guidance at a hardware store. I've hung art, shelving and curtain rods, and our current project is painting our guest room, which doubles as my office. We hire a handyman only for more complicated work.
Plan for the big stuff. "Beyond the first year, that's when you see people taking on bigger projects," Wolf says. "They've had a chance to live in their house and use the space." Begin to budget for renovations, especially if you need to hire a general contractor. Wolf recommends getting on the contractor's schedule during their low season and buying some items when they happen to be on sale, even if the installation has to wait.
3. Even 'move-in-ready' homes need work
A new neighbor told me she spent $500 on an electrician to replace older, ungrounded electrical outlets throughout her house. We lucked out with modern outlets, but not enough of them. We hired an electrician at $75 an hour to install more than a dozen additional outlets. Neither our house nor our neighbor's was sold as a fixer-upper.
"The first year of homeownership is usually spent finding out all of the flaws you didn't notice during open house and the final walkthrough," Coker says.
What should you do?
Be nosy at the open house. Pepper the real estate agent with questions, flip all the light switches and open all the closets. Look for furniture in an illogical place, which may be covering damage. "It's perfectly acceptable to lift up a rug to make sure there's nothing funky under there," Wolf says.
Assess what can wait for later. Your home inspector can identify what needs to be fixed now and what can wait. You can begin saving for future renovations while you make do with the cramped kitchen or lackluster backyard.
Don't put off maintenance. Little issues balloon into expensive repairs. Routine maintenance on even new appliances and systems can help them last longer and run more efficiently.
This article was written by NerdWallet and was originally published by The Associated Press.
Published at Tue, 22 Dec 2020 10:02:00 +0000


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By Bob Humphrey
A look at whitetail bedding areas and how they're important to hunters.
My son Ben and I made our way to within 100 yards of our double ladder stand. "We're gonna have to be as quiet as we can from here on," I said. He understood why and nodded. We moved slowly and quietly, inching forward only when the wind blew, then crept up and settled into the stand. So far, so good.
It was barely an hour and a half into our vigil when we heard something stir in the tall reeds and cattails. Moments later, a big doe popped into view. She didn't arrive. She'd been right in front of us the whole time, bedded less than 75 yards away. We just couldn't see her until she rose to her feet.
I fought the sudden surge of adrenaline then talked my son through it. "Don't rush," I whispered. "Wait until you have a clear shot."
The deer angled slowly toward us, then turned and headed for the woods. I was shaking as badly as Ben. A loud blaat on my grunt call stopped the doe, giving him a perfect broadside shot. His rifle roared, and the doe took several bounds before collapsing.
The suddenness of her appearance took us both by surprise, despite the fact we were somewhat expecting it. In fact, it was the reason we were there.
We'd located the spot the previous fall when we jumped several deer from their beds. We erected the double ladder the following summer. Our plan was to wait until the wind was right, and then slip in to the stand as quietly as possible in hopes the deer would be resting in front of us. Darned if it didn't work. Furthermore, the ancient doe dressed out at 145 pounds. We'd outwitted a real trophy. It wasn't the first time I'd used that tactic with similar results.
Of all the types of habitat deer use, bedding areas are probably the least understood and least utilized by hunters. Go back through your stack of Buckmasters for the past several years and look at what the articles focus on: feeding areas, funnels and travel corridors. Most advise to stay away from bedding habitat, which is ironic when you consider whitetails spend 70 percent or more of every day bedded.
It only stands to reason if you spend more time where deer spend the most time, you'll see more of them.
But that's easier said than done.
Hunting in and around bedding areas requires extra attention to detail.
To exploit bedding areas you need to find them, which requires you to be able to recognize them. Unfortunately, bedding areas seldom meet neatly defined criteria. Whitetails are found in a di-verse range of habitats, and they don't read books and magazines to know they're supposed to bed in a particular type of habitat.
Still, there are some commonalities.
In mountainous terrain, deer tend to move up in the morning, bed high during the day then move down at night. I saw an exception in Wyoming when I found them bedded in the woody draws at the base of steep hills.
In agricultural country, whitetails often lay up in the thickets during the day and move into the fields at dusk. In eastern Montana, however, I've seen them suddenly pop up out of their beds in the middle of a 100-acre alfalfa field.
In the northern forests, they tend to seek the thickest, nastiest cover they can find, but I've jumped them so close to houses I couldn't shoot.
The point is, you can be confident, but never sure.
Midwest hunters have it about as easy as it gets. Once the corn is cut, the only cover left is grassy swales, narrow windrows and small patches of timber, and that's where the deer bed.
It also helps to understand general bedding behavior patterns. Deer are most active at dawn and dusk, with activity levels progressively decreasing as you move away from these peaks in either direction.
While most deer follow the same major pattern, radio collar studies have documented a minor pattern contrary to what most people think. Although deer remain relatively inactive outside of peak periods, they do move. I assisted with a radio collar study in Massachusetts that found deer seldom remained in the same bed more than an hour. They would periodically get up to stretch and move a few feet before lying down again.
Whitetails also use different beds at different times of day. My observation has been they might bed close to, or even in, nighttime feeding areas, but move off to more secluded or protected areas for their day beds. Studies have also shown they might move closer to feeding areas, and then stage or even bed for a short time before moving out to feed in the late afternoon.
These are all things to keep in mind when laying out your plan of attack.
Approach is everything when it comes to hunting in and around bedding areas, and this applies to both timing and direction. Deer typically bed in areas where they can use wind, cover and ter-rain to their advantage. For example, they might position themselves with the wind and the thickest cover at their back and an open view in front, all of which make it easier for them to detect danger. They don't use reason and deduction to locate these areas. It's more a matter of learning, through experience, where they will be the safest and least disturbed. That's why the oldest deer typically have the best, safest bedding areas.
Wind is always a factor when hunting, but especially when working around bedding areas. You have to approach from downwind and set up downwind. And if you mess up, chances are you've burned that stand, and quite possibly the bedding area, for good.
You also need to minimize evidence of your intrusion.
Be meticulous with scent control, particularly on clothing, shoes or anything that will potentially leave human odor in the environment. Try to approach from a direction the deer don't use. Scent can linger for days, and a wise old buck might detect you long after you've gone. If he does, he won't be back.
Sometimes you have to be creative. I once located a prime bedding area where a stealthy approach seemed impossible. Coming in from the north or west, I'd have the wind at my back. Cover to the south was nearly impenetrable, and the east side was protected by a river. Instead of protection for the deer, the water provided a stealthy avenue of approach for me — by canoe. I slipped in early one morning and caught a buck coming in to use a bed he never reached.
In open country where deer can see a long way off, foot approach is sometimes not an option. You wouldn't ordinarily think of motorized vehicles as a means for approaching bedding areas, but deer become accustomed to regular vehicle traffic like farm equipment and even ATVs. In such cases, get someone to drive you to your stand.
In the early season, days are long and temperatures warm. Deer are still in their late summer patterns, which means they're not moving until the very last minutes of daylight and returning to bedding areas very early in the morning. That is particularly true of bucks.
You might never see them unless you're right up against bedding cover.
I learned this by accident, and by taking a cautious approach. I was hunting a funnel connecting a dense thicket of bedding cover with a larger block of open, mast-producing hardwoods. There was a ton of sign, but I wasn't seeing deer. I learned why when I set up cameras. The deer were going through every day, just too early and too late. I incrementally moved closer to bedding areas until I eventually hit the hot spot. I have since killed three nice bucks and missed a fourth out of that same stand, and all those encounters came within the final 10 minutes of shooting light.
Much the same is true of pressured deer, and the more you pressure them, the more nocturnal they become. That's why it's better to take a cautious, incremental approach to hunting near bedding areas. Cameras can tell you when deer are moving through and if you need to move.
Timing also applies to when you should approach. Just because you're hunting only the very first and last hours of the day doesn't mean you can go in to your stand later. In fact, for the reasons already mentioned, you need to get into your afternoon stand well in advance of anticipated movement. Deer might be moving incrementally closer to feeding areas throughout the early afternoon, and you don't want to get caught moving in while they're moving out.
During morning hunts, there's a good chance some deer will be moving back to bed before daylight. You need to get there ahead of them, or you might never see the daylight movers.
There's an axiom that all things in nature move toward entropy. Humans like to place things into neat categories, while nature prefers disorder and chaos.
I'd like to be able to define bedding cover as one thing and travel areas and feeding cover as another, but I can't. That's partly because of the aforementioned variability, but also because bed-ding, feeding and travel areas are not mutually exclusive.
One of my all-time best bow stands overlooks a fallow apple tree that's smack dab in the middle of prime bedding cover. My first bow kill came near the top of an open oak ridge that was dimpled with day beds. The whitetails in both those cases were literally bedding in their food.
Like humans, deer are individuals, and each can act differently.
Does tend to be more social and are more inclined to bed with other deer. Bucks tend to be less social and more inclined to seek solitude. Older ones tend to bed in safer, more secluded areas.
You can use that knowledge to your advantage. Outside the rut, look for single, large beds in secluded areas. When the rut hits, bucks will be targeting doe groups, and so should you. Set up just downwind of doe bedding areas where bucks will be cruising to scent-check for hot does.
How, when and where you hunt bedding areas depends on specific, localized circumstances. In all cases, consider what areas offer deer the best chance to detect and escape danger. Then you need to figure out how to get as close as possible without being detected. Wait until conditions are right and hunt these stands conservatively. They're special places that can produce special results.
• Get Up and Go! You need a Plan B when treestands and food plot vigils aren't working.
• The Long Haul: The more time you spend in the woods, the better your odds for success.
• How to Get Bow-Close: Advice from this traditional bowhunter can help you be in the right spot.
One-Year Subscription to Buckmasters Whitetail Magazine (5 issues) $10.95
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Given confusion around the phrase "science of delivery," it's important to state that delivery science is not a "one-size-fits-all" prescription based on the premise that what works somewhere can work anywhere. And it does not profess that research and evidence ensure a certain outcome.
A few weeks ago, the World Bank and the Korea Development Institute convened a global conference on the science of delivery. Several development institutions assembled including the Gates Foundation, the Grameen Foundation, UNICEF, the Dartmouth Center for Health Care Delivery Science, and the mHealth Alliance. We discussed development opportunities and challenges when focusing on the extremely poor, including experiments in health care, how technology is reducing costs and increasing effectiveness, and the difficulty of moving from successful pilots to delivery at scale.
The consensus in Seoul was that a science of delivery underscores the importance of a data-driven and rigorous process to understand what works, under what conditions, why, and how. Too often in international development, we jump to conclusions without understanding counterfactuals and assume we can replicate success without understanding its constituent elements.
Our two units (World Bank Institute and World Bank's ICT Unit) focus on integrating technology and innovative processes into World Bank-supported programs to tackle global challenges — from youth employment, food security, and climate change to water, sanitation, health, and education. This has made it clear to us that there are no blueprint solutions. Even when we know what works in one context, we need to adapt and adopt solutions and pay close attention to implementation as a science (some call it an art).
But let us spell out some principles that emerged in Seoul that we hope will be welcomed by development practitioners.
1. The importance of framing the right problem cannot be overstated. Too often we are hammers looking for nails and don't address the actual causes in our interventions. If we're working on symptoms rather than underlying causes, we're unlikely to succeed and likely to frustrate our partners and beneficiaries.
2. End-user preferences matter. We shouldn't assume we know what "users" want or need (whether they are patients, students, or water users) without asking them and allowing them to make informed choices. Too often we over-supply what people don't need (e.g. prostate surgeries in the United States) and under-supply what they want (a better quality of life).
3. Complex problems don't fit neatly into sector-specific boxes or correspond to the way experts and expert-led institutions are organized. Places like the World Bank have practices dedicated to health, education, water, and transport, for example. But the challenge of youth unemployment is about education, labor markets, private sector development, and access to finance. It doesn't fit neatly into any one box and requires multi-disciplinary and multi-stakeholder teams to identify binding constraints and leverage strengths from government, the private sector, and civil society to 'unblock' them.
4. All delivery is data. Technology, and mobile phones in particular, have reduced the cost of data collection, analytics, and visualization. We can leverage this information to make better decisions faster and create feedback loops with our ultimate beneficiaries. The World Bank has always been a data-centric organization, but these new tools for collecting and making sense of data can allow us to become a data-driven organization.
5. Implementation matters and requires adaptive execution. Leadership teams must be able to change direction when necessary and use "learning by doing" and "doing by learning" approaches to fail fast, fail small, and fail forward. Development challenges require technical and adaptive skills. Technical specialists tend to under-value process expertise, iteration, and the challenges of implementation. Successful implementation is about turning art into science by building practitioners' capacity to learn faster, iterate, and change course when needed.
Traditional development models capture knowledge when it is too late to apply lessons to live projects. We need ways to develop and challenge our hypotheses while we execute and be less concerned about the accuracy of our original hypotheses. We need to try many things, look for positive deviants where they exist, and better understand why some results are better than others despite similar circumstances. What are we not seeing and what could we learn if only we admitted we might be working with misinformed assumptions? Can we be rigorous without being rigid and open without being undisciplined? And this requires evolving the "knowledge agenda" to what conference participants called the "do agenda."
Development needs a much more robust learning-by-doing approach to solve vexing challenges with (rather than for) clients. This requires humility and the courage to admit what has not worked. What if we could publish an annual learning from failure report and use failure as an opportunity to iterate and improve outcomes? What if our data was open for all to see throughout project implementation, recognizing that solutions can emerge from unexpected places? Why can't we assemble multi-disciplinary teams with expertise in areas which include behavioral science, technology, and impact evaluation to work with sector experts on the hardest delivery challenges?
We need to create a community and a movement to address the most extreme poverty on the planet. The World Bank cannot do it alone, and so we invite partners to join us in a more open, rigorous, and client-centric effort to solving the world's hardest problems. Are you up for it?


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There's a famous definition in the Gospels of the hypocrite, and the hypocrite is the person who refuses to apply to himself the standards he applies to others. By that standard, the entire commentary and discussion of the so-called War on Terror is pure hypocrisy, virtually without exception. Can anybody understand that? No, they can't understand it.
—Noam Chomsky, Power and Terror, 2003
Noam Chomsky was the most conspicuous American intellectual to rationalize the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. The death toll, he argued, was minor compared to the list of Third World victims of the "far more extreme terrorism" of United States foreign policy. Despite its calculated affront to mainstream opinion, this sentiment went down very well with Chomsky's own constituency. He has never been more popular among the academic and intellectual left than he is today.
Two books of interviews with him published since September 11, 2001 both went straight onto the bestseller lists.[1] One of them has since been turned into a film entitled Power and Terror, now doing brisk business in the art-house movie market. In March 2002 the film's director, John Junkerman, accompanied his subject to the University of California, Berkeley, where in a five-day visit Chomsky gave five political talks to a total audience of no fewer than five thousand people.
Meanwhile, the liberal news media around the world has sought him out for countless interviews as the most prominent intellectual opposed to the American response to the terrorist attacks. Newspaper articles routinely open by reminding readers of his awesome intellectual status. A profile headlined "Conscience of a Nation" in the English daily The Guardian declared: "Chomsky ranks with Marx, Shakespeare, and the Bible as one of the ten most quoted sources in the humanities—and is the only writer among them still alive." The New York Times has called him "arguably the most important intellectual alive."
Chomsky has used his status, originally gained in the field of linguistics, to turn himself into the leading voice of the American left. He is not merely a spokesman. His own stance has done much to structure left-wing politics over the past forty years. Today, when actors, rock stars, and protesting students mouth anti-American slogans for the cameras, they are very often expressing sentiments they have gleaned from Chomsky's voluminous output.
Hence, to examine Chomsky's views is to analyze the core mindset of contemporary radicalism, especially the variety that now holds so much sway in the academic and arts communities.
Chomsky has been a celebrity radical since the mid-1960s when he made his name as an anti-Vietnam War activist. Although he lost some of his appeal in the late-1970s and 1980s by his defense of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, he has used September 11 to restore his reputation, indeed to surpass his former influence and stature. At seventy-four years of age, he is today the doyen of the American and much of the world's intellectual left.
He is, however, an unconventional academic radical. Over the past thirty years, the left in the humanities has been smitten by high theory, especially neo-Marxist, feminist, and postmodernist philosophy out of Germany and France. Much of this material was arcane enough in its own language but in translation it elevated obscurantism to a badge of prestige. It inundated the humanities with relativism both in epistemology and moral philosophy.
In contrast, Chomsky has produced no substantial body of political theory of his own. Nor is he a relativist. He advocates the pursuit of truth and knowledge about human affairs and promotes a simple, universal set of moral principles. Moreover, his political writings are very clear, pitched to a general rather than specialist audience. He supports his claims not by appeals to some esoteric conceptual apparatus but by presenting plain, apparently factual evidence. The explanation for his current appeal, therefore, needs to be sought not in recent intellectual fashions but in something with a longer history.
Chomsky is the most prominent intellectual remnant of the New Left of the 1960s. In many ways he epitomized the New Left and its hatred of "Amerika," a country he believed, through its policies both at home and abroad, had descended into fascism. In his most famous book of the Sixties, American Power and the New Mandarins, Chomsky said what America needed was "a kind of denazification."
Of all the major powers in the Sixties, according to Chomsky, America was the most reprehensible. Its principles of liberal democracy were a sham. Its democracy was a "four-year dictatorship" and its economic commitment to free markets was merely a disguise for corporate power. Its foreign policy was positively evil. "By any objective standard," he wrote at the time, "the United States has become the most aggressive power in the world, the greatest threat to peace, to national self-determination, and to international cooperation."
As an anti-war activist, Chomsky participated in some of the most publicized demonstrations, including the attempt, famously celebrated in Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night, to form a human chain around the Pentagon. Chomsky described the event as "tens of thousands of young people surrounding what they believe to be—I must add that I agree—the most hideous institution on this earth."
This kind of anti-Americanism was common on the left at the time but there were two things that made Chomsky stand out from the crowd. He was a scholar with a remarkable reputation and he was in tune with the anti-authoritarianism of the student-based New Left.
At the time, the traditional left was still dominated by an older generation of Marxists, who were either supporters of the Communist Party or else Trotskyists opposed to Joseph Stalin and his heirs but who still endorsed Lenin and Bolshevism. Either way, the emerging generation of radical students saw both groups as compromised by their support for the Russian Revolution and the repressive regimes it had bequeathed to eastern Europe.
Chomsky was not himself a member of the student generation—in 1968 he was a forty-year-old tenured professor—but his lack of party membership or any other formal political commitment absolved him of any connection to the Old Left. Instead, his adherence to anarchism, or what he called "libertarian socialism," did much to shape the outlook of the New Left.
American Power and the New Mandarins approvingly quotes the nineteenth-century anarchist Mikhail Bakunin predicting that the version of socialism supported by Karl Marx would end up transferring state power not to the workers but to the elitist cadres of the Communist Party itself.
Despite his anti-Bolshevism, Chomsky remained a supporter of socialist revolution. He urged that "a true social revolution" would transform the masses so they could take power into their own hands and run institutions themselves. His favorite real-life political model was the short-lived anarchist enclave formed in Barcelona in 1936–1937 during the Spanish Civil War.
The Sixties demand for "student power" was a consequence of this brand of political thought. It allowed the New Left to persuade itself that it had invented a more pristine form of radicalism, untainted by the totalitarianism of the communist world.
For all his in-principle disdain of communism, however, when it came to the real world of international politics Chomsky turned out to endorse a fairly orthodox band of socialist revolutionaries. They included the architects of communism in Cuba, Fidel Castro and Che Guevera, as well as Mao Tse-tung and the founders of the Chinese communist state. Chomsky told a forum in New York in December, 1967 that in China "one finds many things that are really quite admirable." He believed the Chinese had gone some way to empowering the masses along lines endorsed by his own libertarian socialist principles:
China is an important example of a new society in which very interesting and positive things happened at the local level, in which a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step.
When he provided this endorsement of what he called Mao Tse-tung's "relatively livable" and "just society," Chomsky was probably unaware he was speaking only five years after the end of the great Chinese famine of 1958–1962, the worst in human history. He did not know, because the full story did not come out for another two decades, that the very collectivization he endorsed was the principal cause of this famine, one of the greatest human catastrophes ever, with a total death toll of thirty million people.
Nonetheless, if he was as genuinely aloof from totalitarianism as his political principles proclaimed, the track record of communism in the USSR—which was by then widely known to have faked its statistics of agricultural and industrial output in the 1930s when its own population was also suffering crop failures and famine—should have left this anarchist a little more skeptical about the claims of the Russians' counterparts in China.
In fact, Chomsky was well aware of the degree of violence that communist regimes had routinely directed at the people of their own countries. At the 1967 New York forum he acknowledged both "the mass slaughter of landlords in China" and "the slaughter of landlords in North Vietnam" that had taken place once the communists came to power. His main objective, however, was to provide a rationalization for this violence, especially that of the National Liberation Front then trying to take control of South Vietnam. Chomsky revealed he was no pacifist.
I don't accept the view that we can just condemn the NLF terror, period, because it was so horrible. I think we really have to ask questions of comparative costs, ugly as that may sound. And if we are going to take a moral position on this—and I think we should—we have to ask both what the consequences were of using terror and not using terror. If it were true that the consequences of not using terror would be that the peasantry in Vietnam would continue to live in the state of the peasantry of the Philippines, then I think the use of terror would be justified.
It was not only Chomsky who was sucked into supporting the maelstrom of violence that characterized the communist takeovers in South-East Asia. Almost the whole of the 1960s New Left followed. They opposed the American side and turned Ho Chi Minh and the Vietcong into romantic heroes.
When the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia in 1975 both Chomsky and the New Left welcomed it. And when news emerged of the extraordinary event that immediately followed, the complete evacuation of the capital Phnom Penh accompanied by reports of widespread killings, Chomsky offered a rationalization similar to those he had provided for the terror in China and Vietnam: there might have been some violence, but this was understandable under conditions of regime change and social revolution.
Although information was hard to come by, Chomsky suggested in an article in 1977 that post-war Cambodia was probably similar to France after liberation at the end of World War II when thousands of enemy collaborators were massacred within a few months. This was to be expected, he said, and was a small price to pay for the positive outcomes of the new government of Pol Pot. Chomsky cited a book by two American left-wing authors, Gareth Porter and George Hildebrand, who had "presented a carefully documented study of the destructive American impact on Cambodia and the success of the Cambodian revolutionaries in overcoming it, giving a very favorable picture of their programs and policies."
By this time, however, there were two other books published on Cambodia that took a very different line. The American authors John Barron and Anthony Paul called their work Murder of a Gentle Land and accused the Pol Pot regime of mass killings that amounted to genocide. François Ponchaud's Cambodia Year Zero repeated the charge.
Chomsky reviewed both books, together with a number of press articles, in The Nation in June 1977. He accused them of publishing little more than anti-communist propaganda. Articles in The New York Times Magazine and The Christian Science Monitor suggested that the death toll was between one and two million people out of a total population of 7.8 million. Chomsky mocked their total and picked at their sources, showing some were dubious and that a famous photograph of forced labor in the Cambodian countryside was actually a fake.
He dismissed the Barron and Paul book partly because it had been published by Reader's Digest and publicized on the front page of The Wall Street Journal, both of them notorious anti-communist publications, and partly because they had omitted to report the views of journalists who had been to Cambodia but not witnessed any executions.
Ponchaud's book was harder to ignore. It was based on the author's personal experience in Cambodia from 1965 until the capture of Phnom Penh, extensive interviews with refugees and reports from Cambodian radio. Moreover, it had been favorably reviewed by a left-wing author in The New York Review of Books, a publication for which Chomsky himself had often written. Chomsky's strategy was to undermine Ponchaud's book by questioning the credibility of his refugee testimony. Acknowledging that Ponchaud "gives a grisly account of what refugees have reported to him about the barbarity of their treatment at the hands of the Khmer Rouge," Chomsky said we should be wary of "the extreme unreliability of refugee reports":
Refugees are frightened and defenseless, at the mercy of alien forces. They naturally tend to report what they believe their interlocutors wish to hear. While these reports must be considered seriously, care and caution are necessary. Specifically, refugees questioned by Westerners or Thais have a vested interest in reporting atrocities on the part of Cambodian revolutionaries, an obvious fact that no serious reporter will fail to take into account.
In 1980, Chomsky expanded this critique into the book After the Cataclysm, co-authored with his long-time collaborator Edward S. Herman. Ostensibly about Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, the great majority of its content was a defense of the position Chomsky took on the Pol Pot regime. By this time, Chomsky was well aware that something terrible had happened: "The record of atrocities in Cambodia is substantial and often gruesome," he wrote. "There can be little doubt that the war was followed by an outbreak of violence, massacre and repression." He mocked the suggestion, however, that the death toll might have reached more than a million and attacked Senator George McGovern's call for military intervention to halt what McGovern called "a clear case of genocide."
Instead, Chomsky commended authors who apologized for the Pol Pot regime. He approvingly cited their analyses that the forced march of the population out of Phnom Penh was probably necessitated by the failure of the 1976 rice crop. If this was true, Chomsky wrote, "the evacuation of Phnom Penh, widely denounced at the time and since for its undoubted brutality, may actually have saved many lives." Chomsky rejected the charge of genocide, suggesting that
the deaths in Cambodia were not the result of systematic slaughter and starvation organized by the state but rather attributable in large measure to peasant revenge, undisciplined military units out of government control, starvation and disease that are direct consequences of the US war, or other such factors.
After the Cataclysm also presented a much more extended critique of refugee testimony. Chomsky revealed his original 1977 source for this had been Ben Kiernan, at the time an Australian graduate student and apologist for the Pol Pot regime, who wrote in the Maoist-inspired Melbourne Journal of Politics. What Chomsky avoided telling his readers, however, was that well before 1980, the year After the Cataclysm was published, Kiernan himself had recanted his position.
Kiernan had spent much of 1978 and 1979 interviewing five hundred Cambodian refugees in camps inside Thailand. They persuaded him they were actually telling the truth. He also gained a mass of evidence from the new Vietnamese-installed regime. This led him to write a mea culpa in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars in 1979. This was a left-wing journal frequently cited by Chomsky, so he must have been aware that Kiernan wrote: "There can be no doubting that the evidence also points clearly to a systematic use of violence against the population by that chauvinist section of the revolutionary movement that was led by Pol Pot." Yet in After the Cataclysm, Chomsky does not acknowledge this at all.
Kiernan later went on to write The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide under the Khmer Rouge 1975–79, a book now widely regarded as the definitive analysis of one of the most appalling episodes in recorded history. In the evacuation of Phnom Penh in 1975, tens of thousands of people died. Almost the entire middle class was deliberately targeted and killed, including civil servants, teachers, intellectuals, and artists. No fewer than 68,000 Buddhist monks out of a total of 70,000 were executed. Fifty percent of urban Chinese were murdered.
Kiernan argues for a total death toll between April 1975 and January 1979, when the Vietnamese invasion put an end to the regime, of 1.67 million out of 7.89 million, or 21 percent of the entire population. This is proportionally the greatest mass killing ever inflicted by a government on its own population in modern times, probably in all history.
Chomsky was this regime's most prestigious and most persistent Western apologist. Even as late as 1988, when they were forced to admit in their book Manufacturing Consent that Pol Pot had committed genocide against his own people, Chomsky and Herman still insisted they had been right to reject the journalists and authors who had initially reported the story. The evidence that became available after the Vietnamese invasion of 1979, they maintained, did not retrospectively justify the reports they had criticized in 1977.
They were still adamant that the United States, who they claimed started it all, bore the brunt of the blame. In short, Chomsky still refused to admit how wrong he had been over Cambodia.
Chomsky has persisted with this pattern of behavior right to this day. In his response to September 11, he claimed that no matter how appalling the terrorists' actions, the United States had done worse. He supported his case with arguments and evidence just as empirically selective and morally duplicitous as those he used to defend Pol Pot. On September 12, 2001, Chomsky wrote:
The terrorist attacks were major atrocities. In scale they may not reach the level of many others, for example, Clinton's bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext, destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies and killing unknown numbers of people.
This Sudanese incident was an American missile attack on the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, where the CIA suspected Iraqi scientists were manufacturing the nerve agent VX for use in chemical weapons contracted by the Saddam Hussein regime. The missile was fired at night so that no workers would be there and the loss of innocent life would be minimised. The factory was located in an industrial area and the only apparent casualty at the time was the caretaker.
While Chomsky drew criticism for making such an odious comparison, he was soon able to flesh out his case. He told a reporter from salon.com that, rather than an "unknown" number of deaths in Khartoum, he now had credible statistics to show there were many more Sudanese victims than those killed in New York and Washington: "That one bombing, according to estimates made by the German Embassy in Sudan and Human Rights Watch, probably led to tens of thousands of deaths." However, this claim was quickly rendered suspect. One of his two sources, Human Rights Watch, wrote to salon.com the following week denying it had produced any such figure. Its communications director said: "In fact, Human Rights Watch has conducted no research into civilian deaths as the result of US bombing in Sudan and would not make such an assessment without a careful and thorough research mission on the ground."
Chomsky's second source had done no research into the matter either. He was Werner Daum, German ambassador to Sudan from 1996 to 2000 who wrote in the Harvard International Review, Summer 2001. Despite his occupation, Daum's article was anything but diplomatic.
It was a largely anti-American tirade criticizing the United States' international human rights record, blaming America for the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, accusing it of ignoring Iraq's gassing of the Kurds, and holding it responsible for the purported deaths of 600,000 Iraqi children as a result of post-1991 economic sanctions. Nonetheless, his comments on the death toll from the Khartoum bombing were not as definitive as Chomsky intimated. Daum wrote:
It is difficult to assess how many people in this poor African country died as a result of the destruction of the Al-Shifa factory, but several tens of thousands seems a reasonable guess. The factory produced some of the basic medicines on the World Health Organization list, covering 20 to 60 percent of Sudan's market and 100 percent of the market for intravenous liquids. It took more than three months for these products to be replaced with imports.
Now, it is hard to take seriously Daum's claim that this "guess" was in any way "reasonable." He said there was a three-month gap between the destruction of the factory and the time it took to replace its products with imports. This seems an implausibly long interval to ship pharmaceuticals but, even if true, it is fanciful to suggest that "several tens of thousands" of people would have died in such a brief period.
Had they done so, they must have succumbed to a highly visible medical crisis, a pandemic to put the SARS outbreak in the shade. Yet no one on the spot, apart from the German ambassador, seems to have heard of it.
Anyone who makes an Internet search of the reports of the Sudanese operations of the several Western aid agencies, including Oxfam, Médecins sans Frontières, and Norwegian People's Aid, who have been operating in this region for decades, will not find any evidence of an unusual increase in the death toll at the time. Instead, their major health concern, then and now, has been how the Muslim Marxist government in Khartoum was waging civil war by bombing the civilian hospitals of its Christian enemies in the south of the country.
The idea that tens of thousands of Sudanese would have died within three months from a shortage of pharmaceuticals is implausible enough in itself. That this could have happened without any of the aid organizations noticing or complaining is simply unbelievable.
Hence Chomsky's rationalization for the September 11 attacks is every bit as deceitful as his apology for Pol Pot and his misreading of the Cambodian genocide.
"It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies," Chomsky wrote in a famous article in The New York Review of Books in February 1967. This was not only a well-put and memorable statement but was also a good indication of his principal target. Most of his adult life has been spent in the critique of other intellectuals who, he claims, have not fulfilled their duty.
The central argument of American Power and the New Mandarins is that the humanities and social sciences had been captured by a new breed of intellectuals. Rather than acting as Socratic free thinkers challenging received opinion, they had betrayed their calling by becoming servants of the military-industrial state. The interests of this new mandarin class, he argued, had turned the United States into an imperial power. Their ideology demonstrated
the mentality of the colonial civil servant, persuaded of the benevolence of the mother country and the correctness of its vision of world order, and convinced that he understands the true interests of the backward peoples whose welfare he is to administer.
Chomsky named the academic fields he regarded as the worst offenders—psychology, sociology, systems analysis, and political science—and held up some well-known practitioners, including Samuel Huntington of Harvard, as among the worst examples. The Vietnam War, Chomsky claimed, was designed and executed by the new mandarins.
In itself, Chomsky's identification of the emergence of a new type of academically trained official was neither original nor radical. Similar critiques had been made of the same phenomenon in both western and eastern Europe for some time. Much of his critique had been anticipated in the 1940s in a book from the other end of the political spectrum, Friedrich von Hayek's Road to Serfdom, which identified the social engineers of the welfare state as the greatest internal threats to Western liberty. Chomsky offered a leftist version of the same idea, writing:
There are dangerous tendencies in the ideology of the welfare state intelligentsia who claim to possess the technique and understanding required to manage our "postindustrial society" and to organize the international society dominated by the American superpower.
Yet at the very time he was making this critique, Chomsky himself was playing at social engineering on an even grander scale. As he indicated in his support in 1967 for the "collectivization and communization" of Chinese and Vietnamese agriculture, with its attendant terror and mass slaughter, he had sought the calculated reorganization of traditional societies. By his advocacy of revolutionary change throughout Asia, he was seeking to play a role in the reorganization of the international order as well.
Hence, apart from occupying a space on the political spectrum much further to the left than the academics he criticized, and apart from his preference for bloodshed over more bureaucratic techniques, Chomsky himself was the very exemplar of the new mandarin he purported to despise.
He was, in fact, one of the more successful examples of the breed. There has now been enough analysis of the Vietnam War to demonstrate conclusively that the United States was not defeated militarily. South Vietnam was abandoned to its fate because of the war's political costs at home. The influence of radical intellectuals like Chomsky in persuading the student generation of the 1960s to oppose the war was crucial in elevating these political costs to an intolerable level.
The result they helped produce, however, was far worse than any bureaucratic solution that might have emanated from the behavioral sciences of the 1960s. From our present vantage point, we can today see the long-term outcome of the choice Chomsky posed in 1967 between the "comparative costs" of revolutionary terror in Vietnam versus the continuation of private enterprise agriculture in the Philippines.
The results all favor the latter. In 2001, the average GDP per head in the Philippines was $4000. At the same time, twenty-five years of revolution in Vietnam had produced a figure of only half as much, a mere $2100. Even those Vietnamese who played major roles in the transformation are now dismayed at the outcome. The former Vietcong General Pham Xuan An said in 1999: "All that talk about 'liberation' twenty, thirty years ago, all the plotting, all the bodies, produced this, this impoverished broken-down country led by a gang of cruel and paternalistic half-educated theorists."
These "half-educated theorists" were the very mandarins Chomsky and his supporters so badly wanted to succeed and worked so hard to install.
As well as social science practitioners and bureaucrats, the other representatives of the intelligentsia to whom Chomsky has long been hostile are the people who work in the news media.
Although his politics made him famous, Chomsky has made no substantial contribution to political theory. Almost all his political books are collections of short essays, interviews, speeches, and newspaper opinion pieces about current events. The one attempt he made at a more thoroughgoing analysis was the work he produced in 1988 with Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. This book, however, must have been a disappointment to his followers.
Media studies is a huge field ranging from traditional defenses of the news media as the fourth estate of the democratic system, to the most arcane cultural analyses produced by radical postmodernist theorists. Chomsky and Herman gave no indication they had digested any of it.
Instead, their book offers a crude analysis that would have been at home in an old Marxist pamphlet from the 1930s. Apart from the introduction, most of the book is simply a re-hash of the authors' previously published work criticizing media coverage of events in central America (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua) and in southeast Asia (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia), plus one chapter on reporting of the 1981 KGB-Bulgarian plot to kill the Pope.
To explain the role of the mass media, Chomsky and Herman offer their "propaganda model." This claims the function of the media is
to amuse, entertain and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfil this role requires systematic propaganda.
This is true, they maintain, whether the media operate in liberal democracies or under totalitarian regimes. The only difference is that in communist and other authoritarian societies, it is clear to everyone that the media are instruments of the dominant elite. In capitalist societies, however, this fact is concealed, since the media "actively compete, periodically attack and expose corporate and governmental malfeasance, and aggressively portray themselves as spokesmen for free speech and the general community interest."
Chomsky and Herman argue that these attacks on authority are always very limited and the claims of free speech are merely smokescreens for inculcating the economic and political agendas of the privileged groups that dominate the economy.
The media, they note, are all owned by large corporations, they are beholden for their income to major national advertisers, most news is generated by large multinational news agencies, and any newspaper or television station that steps out of line is bombarded with "flak" or letters, petitions, lawsuits, and speeches from pro-capitalist institutes set up for this very purpose.
There are, however, two glaring omissions from their analysis: the role of journalists and the preferences of media audiences. Nowhere do the authors explain how journalists and other news producers come to believe they are exercising their freedom to report the world as they see it. Chomsky and Herman simply assert these people have been duped into seeing the world through a pro-capitalist ideological lens.
Nor do they attempt any analysis of why millions of ordinary people exercise their free choice every day to buy newspapers and tune in to radio and television programs. Chomsky and Herman fail to explain why readers and viewers so willingly accept the world-view of capitalist media proprietors. They provide no explanation for the tastes of media audiences.
This view of both journalists and audiences as easily-led, ideological dupes of the powerful is not just a fantasy of Chomsky and Herman's own making. It is also a stance that reveals an arrogant and patronising contempt for everyone who does not share their politics. The disdain inherent in this outlook was revealed during an exchange between Chomsky and a questioner at a conference in 1989 (reproduced in Chomsky, Understanding Power, 2002):
Man: The only poll I've seen about journalists is that they are basically narcissistic and left of center.
Chomsky: Look, what people call "left of center" doesn't mean anything—it means they're conventional liberals and conventional liberals are very state-oriented, and usually dedicated to private power.
In short, Chomsky believes that only he and those who share his radical perspective have the ability to rise above the illusions that keep everyone else slaves of the system. Only he can see things as they really are.
Since the European Enlightenment a number of prominent intellectuals have presented themselves as secular Christ-like figures, lonely beacons of light struggling to survive in a dark and corrupting world. This is a tactic that has often delivered them followers among students and other idealistic youths in late adolescence.
The phenomenon has been most successful when accompanied by an uncomplicated morality that its constituency can readily absorb. In his ruminations on September 11, Chomsky reiterated his own apparently direct and simple moral principles. Reactions to the terrorist attacks, he said, "should meet the most elementary moral standards: specifically, if an action is right for us, it is right for others; and if it is wrong for others, it is wrong for us."
Unfortunately, like his declaration of the responsibility of the intellectual to speak the truth and expose lies, Chomsky himself has consistently demonstrated an inability to abide by his own standards. Among his most provocative recent demands are for American political and military leaders to be tried as war criminals. He has often couched this in terms of the failure by the United States to apply the same standards to itself as it does to its enemies.
For instance, America tried and executed the remaining World War Two leaders of Germany and Japan, but failed to try its own personnel for the "war crime" of dropping the atomic bomb on Japan. Chomsky claims the American bombing of dams during the Korean War was "a huge war crime . . . just like racist fanaticism" but the action was praised at home. "That's just a couple of years after they hanged German leaders who were doing much less than that."
The worst current example, he claims, is American support for Israel:
virtually everything that Israel is doing, meaning the United States and Israel are doing, is illegal, in fact, a war crime. And many of them they defined as "grave breaches," that is, serious war crimes. This means that the United States and Israeli leadership should be brought to trial.
Yet Chomsky's moral perspective is completely one-sided. No matter how great the crimes of the regimes he has favored, such as China, Vietnam, and Cambodia under the communists, Chomsky has never demanded their leaders be captured and tried for war crimes. Instead, he has defended these regimes for many years to the best of his ability through the use of evidence he must have realized was selective, deceptive, and in some cases invented.
In fact, had Pol Pot ever been captured and tried in a Western court, Chomsky's writings could have been cited as witness for the defense. Were the same to happen to Osama bin Laden, Chomsky's moral rationalizations in his most recent book—"almost any crime, a crime in the street, a war, whatever it may be, there's usually something behind it that has elements of legitimacy"—could be used to plead for a lighter sentence.
This kind of two-faced morality has provided a model for the world-wide protests by left-wing opponents of the American-led coalition's war against Iraq. The left was willing to tolerate the most hideous acts of state terrorism by the Saddam Hussein regime, but was implacable in its hostility to intervention by Western democratic governments in the interests of both their own security and the emancipation of the Iraqi people. This is hypocrisy writ large.
The long political history of this aging activist demonstrates that double standards of the same kind have characterized his entire career.
Chomsky has declared himself a libertarian and anarchist but has defended some of the most authoritarian and murderous regimes in human history. His political philosophy is purportedly based on empowering the oppressed and toiling masses but he has contempt for ordinary people who he regards as ignorant dupes of the privileged and the powerful. He has defined the responsibility of the intellectual as the pursuit of truth and the exposure of lies, but has supported the regimes he admires by suppressing the truth and perpetrating falsehoods. He has endorsed universal moral principles but has only applied them to Western liberal democracies, while continuing to rationalize the crimes of his own political favorites. He is a mandarin who denounces mandarins. When caught out making culpably irresponsible misjudgments, as he was over Cambodia and Sudan, he has never admitted he was wrong.
Today, Chomsky's hypocrisy stands as the most revealing measure of the sorry depths to which the left-wing political activism he has done so much to propagate has now sunk.
- September 11, by Noam Chomsky; Seven Stories Press, 96 pages, $8.95. Power and Terror: Post 9/11 Talks and Interviews, by Noam Chomsky, edited by John Junkerman and Takei Masakazu; Seven Stories Press, 144 pages, $11.95. Go back to the text.


text:
Religious Freedom and the Need to Wake Up
by Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap.
"IRS officials have, of course, confessed that they inappropriately targeted conservative groups — especially those with 'tea party' or 'patriot' in their names — for extra scrutiny when they sought non-profit status. Allegations of abuse or harassment have since broadened to include groups conducting grassroots projects to 'make America a better place to live,' to promote classes about the U.S. Constitution or to raise support for Israel.
"However, it now appears the IRS also challenged some individuals and religious groups that, while defending key elements of their faith traditions, have criticized projects dear to the current White House, such as health-care reform, abortion rights and same-sex marriage."
Terry Mattingly, director, Washington Journalism Center; weekly column, May 22
Let's begin this week with a simple statement of fact. America's Catholic bishops started pressing for adequate health-care coverage for all of our nation's people decades before the current administration took office. In the Christian tradition, basic medical care is a matter of social justice and human dignity. Even now, even with the financial and structural flaws that critics believe undermine the 2010 Affordable Care Act, the bishops continue to share the goal of real health-care reform and affordable medical care for all Americans.
Abortion, Contraception Consequences on Display in Gosnell's 'house of horrors'
Our news outlets are not known for their squeamish attitude toward violence. On the contrary, reporters are often criticized for fixating on violence, exploiting it as fodder for the 24-hour news cycle.
We rarely see journalists shying away from a gruesome case. Yet, the media has been reluctant to cover the trial of Dr. Kermit Gosnell – a Philadelphia abortionist accused of committing unspeakable crimes at his "Women's Medical Center." (more…)
Vatican Cardinal: 'Individual bishops', not just conferences must fight culture of death
ROME, April 23, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The bishops of the world must, as individuals, take the lead in combating the Culture of Death, and not wait for the national conferences, Cardinal Raymond Burke told LifeSiteNews.com in an interview yesterday.
"It should be emphasized that the individual bishop has a responsibility in this matter. Sometimes what happens is the individual bishops are unwilling to do anything because they wait for the national bishops' conference to take the lead."
Warning against some of the bureaucratic trends of "truth by committee" in the Church's organisation, Cardinal Burke said, "Simply by the way these conferences work, it can be years before some kind of effective direction is given, and then oftentimes because this direction is discussed and debated, it can get very watered down."
Philippines archdiocese to distribute pro-life, pro-family candidates list
MANILA, April 23, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – With less than three weeks until the May 13 elections in the Philippines, one of the country's largest Catholic archdioceses has prepared a list of candidates that have publicly taken a stand on the side of church teaching on pro-life and pro-family issues.
Speaking on the Mornings@ANC TV show, Lipa Archbishop Ramon Arguelles said the decision to distribute sample ballots containing names of candidates who are "one with the church on controversial issues," came in response to requests from Catholics to the archdioceses for guidance.
"The people are asking to be told," said the archbishop. "The others have made the choice but many want to know who are the right persons, so we make it available. We're starting to do that now."
He said that the list of acceptable candidates was created after consultations with lay leaders, who ranked candidates according to their stand on abortion, divorce, the new reproductive-health law, and protection of the environment.
Only vote for politicians who oppose abortion, divorce, gay 'marriage': Filipino archbishop
DAGUPAN CITY, Philippines, April 17, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A leading Filipino prelate has issued a pastoral letter encouraging Catholics to support only those candidates in the forthcoming election who "declare a categorical and clear NO to divorce, abortion, euthanasia, total birth control and homosexual marriages"
Most Rev. Socrates B. Villegas, the archbishop of the archdiocese of Lingayen-Dagupan, said that while the Church does not interfere in elections by endorsing candidates, it does offer guidance to voters to examine the candidates "from the viewpoint of faith and with the mind of the Church enlightened by the values of the Gospel."
The archbishop offered ten concrete moral guidelines to the faithful in the light of which to consider the candidates, with the admonition that "If Jesus would vote, for whom would he vote? Vote like Jesus. If you cannot find Jesus from among the candidates just make sure you do not make Judas or Barabbas win."
NFP and married life
By Fr William Gardner
Source: Fr. W. M. Gardner, "NFP and married life," HPR, Jan., 2010, pp 61-65
While discussing the economic challenges in raising children one secular radio show host commented wryly: "There are ways to avoid having children: You can not do sex… or you can not do real sex… or there is abortion." Abortion is never a legitimate choice, recent American jurisprudence and Machiavellian politics notwithstanding. However, the implication that contraceptive sex does not qualify as "real" sex merits favorable attention.
We might ask though: If a Catholic had called into the program and attempted to explain that there is a fourth way to avoid having children; namely, the use of the Natural Family Planning (NFP), would the host and the listeners recognize the difference between NFP and not doing "real" sex? I suspect that the difference would elude many listeners. Furthermore, it would be a tough sell, and perhaps rightly so (1).
In this article I wish to affirm that the practice of periodic continence, which is the lynch-pin of NFP, does not represent the ideal way of married life. There is something deficient in the practice of having sexual intercourse exclusively during the infertile times of the women's cycle. To illustrate this deficiency I wish to examine two analogies that attempt to explain the moral justification of periodic continence. Then I will conclude with a caution about promoting NFP as an ideal, or normal, way of married life. (more…)
A Theology of Life-Giving
By Fr William Gardner
Source: Fr. W. M. Gardner, "A Theology of Life-Giving," HPR, Aug/Sep, 2007, pp. 68-73.
"Of Angels and Men," is the title of an article written by Fr. Thomas Weinandy, OFM Cap., that appeared in the journal Nova et Vetera (1). Fr. Weinandy interestingly suggests that St. Thomas erred when he attributed a higher place to angels than men in the order of creation. The author, instead, holds that humans are actually more in the image and likeness of the Triune God than the angels because of their ability to give life. It is the power to give life, which the angels do not possess that allows man and woman to model the relations of the Persons of the Holy Trinity. The Father eternally begets the Son. The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father by conforming the Father to be the loving Father of the Son. And the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son by conforming the Son to be the loving Son of the Father. Human procreation imitates this procession of Persons within the Holy Trinity. (more…)


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Over the decades, Ai Weiwei has become one of the most influential artists and activists of our time, which is why the Chinese government has long fixed its gaze on him. In 2011, Chinese authorities secretly detained Ai Weiwei. And while in detention, the artist thought often about his father, how incomplete his understanding of his father was and how much he wanted to avoid that same disconnect with his own son. So Ai Weiwei decided to set down his thoughts and memories in a new book called "1,000 Years Of Joys And Sorrows."
It's a story passed down through fathers, a work that ponders freedom of expression, how art can move ideas, and the beauty that can emerge from life's ugliest struggles. His own father, Ai Qing, was a famous poet who was branded as a so-called rightist during the Cultural Revolution under Mao Zedong, and I began by asking Ai Weiwei why his thoughts kept wandering to his father while he was in detention.
AI WEIWEI: I realize I don't really know him because I never really directly ask him a single question about his past, you know, going through all those difficulties and the struggles. Until I was arrest, I realize I may have a same kind of relationship with my son. That time, he was just over 2 years old. And the authority told me, after 10 or 12 years, you'll finish your sentence, and your son certainly will not even know you are his father.
CHANG: Well, you were eventually released. But may I ask - when you think back, when you were a boy, did you understand at the time why your father was sent there? Did you have a deep sense as a child that the Chinese government was basically punishing your father for his ideas?
AI: No way to understand. Nobody even understand. At that time, we are totally, like, dropped into water. You got totally wet, and there's no way to have another choice or another possibility. The whole nation was under this very highly political class struggle. Not only my father being punished but over a half-million other intellectuals being punished. They're writers, translators or educators, you know?
CHANG: Between you and your father growing up, how would you characterize your relationship with him? Would you have described the two of you as close back then?
AI: No, I never even think we are close. Also, I never see any family have a close relationship during that period. Love is never a word to be mentioned in any family. The love only belongs to the party and the Chairman Mao, the party's leader. Everybody's so scared.
CHANG: Yeah.
AI: Even all those parents gave the - their children, newly born children - the name is love the country or love the party.
CHANG: Names that would make the Chinese Communist Party happy.
AI: Whole generation have maybe - half of the population would have same kind of name.
CHANG: You know, there is so much in this book that reflects how your life later as an artist inside the Chinese communist system - how that life echoed so much of your own father's life, not just your time in detention but the constant monitoring you faced every day when you lived in China. And I want to ask you - how do you think that constant surveillance by the Chinese government, that constant observation helped you relate to your father better?
AI: Well, modern surveillance is because technology, of course. I have been under surveillance - 25 cameras around my studio, people following me, hiding behind bushes, take photos to see who I meet and, you know, all those kind of ridiculous.
CHANG: Right.
AI: I start to understand that generation, how difficult for them. Today, I have internet. I can easily have my voice being heard. But during that time, they cannot even whisper to their loved ones about what's in their mind.
CHANG: Well, as I listen to you talk about how much of an adversary the Chinese government has played in your life, in your father's life, you know, it made me wonder because, yes, the Chinese government has played a destructive role in your life but, also, in a way, the Chinese government has played a strangely creative role, too.
Like, I'm curious. Where do you think Ai Weiwei the artist would be without the Chinese government being such an oppositional force in your life, driving you to understand what is important to you, what to fight for, what to stand up against? Do you think you could be the same artist without the Chinese government?
AI: No way, no way. It's not possible. Once this interrogator - he already interrogated me for over a year. He asked me very sincerely, without us, you can never be so famous. I said, yes, it take a real enemy to make a soldier. And also, I'm grateful I can really exercise my individual struggle and freedom of speech.
CHANG: Yes.
AI: So I have something to say about it.
CHANG: Without that struggle, you wouldn't have the same things to say.
AI: Without struggle, we don't have life. Life is about the struggle.
CHANG: Well, as we mentioned this book, it is in large part, a written record for your son, Ai Lao, so that Ai Lao can better understand who his father is. And, you know, you write at one point of your own father. You say, quote, "although he never tried to influence my decisions and never asked anything of me, like a star in the sky or a tree in the field, he was always there as a compass point and in a quiet and mysterious way, he helped me to navigate in a direction all my own." Let me ask you - how much do you want a similar relationship with Ai Lao?
AI: I want he recognize he does have a father and that person have his own principle. But I want to be there so he can see me as there.
CHANG: And when you think about your own struggles, what do you want most for Ai Lao's life?
AI: I want him to have a independent thinking and to a healthy life - I would say that's a healthy life.
CHANG: That's exactly what my parents say they want for me.
Ai Weiwei, thank you so much for sharing this time with us. (Speaking Mandarin).
AI: (Speaking Mandarin).
CHANG: (Laughter, speaking Mandarin). Ai Weiwei said, "thank you," and he complimented me on my Mandarin. His new book is called "1,000 Years Of Joys And Sorrows."
(SOUNDBITE OF NATHAN KAWANISHI'S "LEISURELY TRAIN RIDE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.


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Almost a decade ago, Matt Wilson went to the emergency room after experiencing a lot of pain. It was pretty clear he had a kidney stone, but the doctors wanted to take a look to be sure.
"After they identified the kidney stone, they told me I had a shadow in my pancreas," said Wilson.
That shadow would lead to a few months without answers.
"Went through testing and went through months of tests without knowing what it is, but they wouldn't rule anything out. The months of not knowing were stressful. They were stressful on me, they were on my family," said Wilson.
Finally, after visiting a specialist in Philadelphia, he finally got an answer.
"They said I had a cancerous tumor on the tail of my pancreas. I went in for a kidney stone and came out with a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer," he recalled.
Wilson knew he wanted to fight. He underwent surgery to remove part of his pancreas, his spleen, and 21 lymph nodes.
Wilson has survived for nine years since his diagnosis. According to the American Cancer Association, the five-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer is just 9 percent.
"It is one of the deadliest cancers," said Julie Fleshman, the CEO of the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network.
The group raises money and awareness for pancreatic cancer. She wants people to know why it's such a hard disease to detect.
"The symptoms of pancreatic cancer are quite vague. There's things like stomach pain and back pain, unexplained weight loss. Things that could be associated with other diseases, so it's not usually the first thing that someone thinks of as oh, maybe it's pancreatic cancer," said Fleshman.
In addition to unclear symptoms, there's no early detection test like you might have with other cancers.
"Usually, by the time it's diagnosed, it's late stage. It's already metastasized or spread to other organs, and it's more difficult to treat at that point," said Fleshman.
But Fleshman and Wilson hope the efforts of organizations like PanCan will lead to an early detection test and more treatments to help save lives.
"I actually really think that it's possible that in the next decade for us to have an early detection strategy," said Fleshman.
"My hope is that we continue to make advances. That we can have early detection for people for pancreatic cancer in the future, and I think we will get there. And that will continue to improve patient outcomes and improve the survival rate of this disease," said Wilson.


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Hello friends, I've missed blogging and making art, but I never stop thinking about both. I've been exceptionally busy this year. I hope you've been well. For me, this has mostly been a year of learning to balance home, work, motherhood, friendships and health while still taking time to pursue some of my interests. Here are some of the things I've been up to this year:
- Work has amped up busier than ever. I've been meeting regularly with three mentors at work and have been researching a career change while maintaining my current job. Recently, my employer agreed to finance my masters degree, for which I am so very grateful!
- As a result of the above, I've applied for the graduate program in Instructional Design and Performance Technology at Franklin University and plan to start coursework this January.
- I was selected for my employer's regional Diversity and Inclusion Council, promoting cultural and diversity themed events at my company, in the capacity of an event coordinator. This has been immensely rewarding for me; I've been able to help promote diversity awareness and educate our workforce about the importance of embracing diversity. Our world is changing, and with it, our attitudes and the way in which we view those who are different from us must change as well, if we are to succeed in working together to build a better future for generations to come.
- My little girl turned 10 this year. She's been very busy herself with her own activities. She reads voraciously, has been involved in gymnastics, Girl Scouts and Kumon, and was one of 6 girls from her school selected by OSU's Women In Engineering for their Jasz Bots program which is affiliated with First Lego League. This team of fifth grade girls meet with female grad students in OSU's engineering department twice a week, for two and a half hours after school. Together, they have researched a topic on FLL's theme this year (Nature's Fury) and are working on ideas and ways to combat their chosen environmental disaster (wildfires). In addition, they have built and programmed a Lego robot; the team will compete utilizing their robot at an upcoming event in December. It's a great introduction for girls to a potential future career in engineering.
- I've continued my commitment to fitness and nutrition, continuing to hit the gym 5 nights a week, both cardio as well as weights/resistance training and core exercises.
- I've become very interested in organic foods and natural wellness products, as well as meditation and wellness in general.
- I've connected with old friends and made several new ones. I have enjoyed the fulfillment brought by these relationships, and particularly by doing for and helping others when I can, as I am grateful for the love and help they constantly give me.
- I made some time for fun as well, traveling to Orlando and Disney with Alekha in mid-October, during Epcot's Food and Wine Festival. We also got to visit the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios, which Alekha and I both loved!
- I've continued my pursuit of photography, though I haven't had time to sit down and edit photos!
- I spent some quality time with my parents, who I love dearly and are slowing down a bit.
- Lastly, I spent a lot of time in quiet reflection and introspection, pondering the life I'd like to lead, the things I have yet to do, the places I've yet to see and the memories I have yet to make.
I am happy, and life has been good. I do miss blogging and keeping in touch with all my online friends, but think of you all frequently, and wish you all happiness and peace. I am looking forward to what 2014 brings.
"...I want first of all - in fact, as an end to these other desires - to be at peace with myself. I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention, a central core to my life that will enable me to carry out these obligations and activities as well as I can. I want, in fact - to borrow from the language of the saints -to live 'in grace' as much of the time as possible. I am not using this term in a strictly theological sense. By grace I mean an inner harmony, essentially spiritual, which can be translated into outward harmony..."
(Anne Morrow Lindbergh)
Much Love,


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NIHIN book series
The book series NIHIN – New Ideas in Human Interaction – is a joint venture of the Hermann Paul School of Linguistics (HPSL) and the Freiburg University Library (UB). NIHIN provides a modern, open access platform for theses and corpus publications.
NIHIN comprises NIHIN studies and NIHIN stories.
NIHIN stories
is geared towards the publication of language corpora. NIHIN stories aims at making spoken language corpora available to the public and at enhancing the visibility of linguistic research in society in general, with a particular focus on oral narrations. NIHIN stories actively implements standards advocated by the German Research Foundation (DFG) with respect to open access and the management, curation and long-term preservation not only of scientific studies but also of (linguistic) scientific data to enable future use and reuse of data gathered for individual projects.NIHIN stories provides a unique opportunity for young academics to publish not only their thesis but also the data they have gathered for their thesis in an easily accessible format. A second publication at such an early stage in their career will be very advantageous for their career.
Published (in order of appearance)
Skrovec, Marie | Bretons en conversation. Souvenirs du Xxe siècle, 2012 |
Dankel, Philipp and Pagel, Steve |
Rosa Alcira Cuenca Quirós. Más que una heroína, 2012 |
Gutowski, Johanna | Ein Sprachreiseführer durch Bolivien, 2012 |
Bulnes, Marta and Feichtner, Maximilian |
La Pachamama y el petróleo. Tradiciones y sus transformaciones en la comunidad kichwa de San Isidro (Ecuador), 2014 |
NIHIN studies
is geared specifically towards current HPSL PhD candidates in linguistics and disciplines related to cognition and interaction who seek a swift, professional and low-cost mode of publishing their PhD thesis.
Published (in order of appearance)
Applicants have to be members of the HPSL. Dissertations awarded at least magna cum laude are eligible for publication in the series.
Authors provide a camera ready copy of their thesis or their corpus as an unprotected pdf file. Publication within the NIHIN series provides the following advantages:
- simultaneous digital and print publication with ISBN number
- inclusion of audio and video data as well as interactive maps in the digital version of the publication
Costs for a NIHIN publication range between 200-400 € for PhD candidates. The authors submit 2 deposit copies to the HPSL.


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In Memory of Arnold (1916-2013)
Arnold lived a long life, yet his departure was too soon for those of us who knew him. Indeed, Arnold was a New England institution, a relentless photographer who picked up his first camera at the age of 12 and refused to put it down for the next 85 years.
Arnold was born a mere 28 years after the introduction of the first film camera. He was there to witness the industry blossom to full glory, and later experienced its painful decline as the digital age turned photography into a hobby for the masses.
Arnold was thrown into the limelight in 1973 after publishing his first book, "How to Find the Photo-Scenics in Vermont". This no-frills book upset stock photographers by revealing previously hush-hush locations. But Arnold firmly believed that everyone should have the right to see and photograph these beautiful places. Incidentally, his Vermont book and a newer Cape Cod book can still be ordered from the Guidebooks page.
Landscape photography may have been his main passion, but Arnold was not afraid to experiment with different styles and media. The Computer Graphics, Bird Chorus, Still Life, and Portraits galleries reflect some of his bold escapades into alternate styles.
Arnold requested that this site become a memorial to the man and his photography. In that regard, the content remains largely unchanged, complete with the biography on the About page that was written in his own words.
Thank you for visiting his site and sharing the legacy of Arnold John Kaplan.