Author: Henry Barnard

I am a voracious reader and also enjoy writing. I often have a very different point of view than the popular one. I do see value in debate, and thought it might add to the public debate on controversial issues if I were to express my contrarian opinions. I also started keeping my poems recently (I've written little pieces my whole adult life but never kept any); and I've been a photographer now for over 25 years. So I will be adding an occasional poem and hopefully interesting photograph to the blog along the way, just to spice things up.

Abortion Wars

In my small home town last weekend, two groups of protesters set up on opposite sides of the street in the middle of the town — the pro-life group (anti-abortion) and the free-choice group (pro-abortion).

The pro-life group had a placard that read: “70 million babies have been slaughtered in the US since 1970”.  One of the signs in the free-choice group had a drawing of a wire coat hanger and the words “Never Again!”.

Pretty had to ignore such a wholesale slaughter of fetuses — literally millions; but it’s also repugnant to think about going back to the days when women would submit to self-mutilation with a wire coat hanger because they had no other choice.

So all of that leaves me exactly nowhere on the issue of abortion.

My Story

Israel/Iran

I’m wondering if Trump is going to give the Israelis the green light to take out the Iranian nuclear facilities?  The US has in its arsenal that bomb for deep penetration of the earth — the “bunker buster” — so the Iranians can’t just dig deep enough to protect their nuclear assets.

We’ve backed away from the agreement with the Iranians — the agreement is a bust, and the Iranians are busy again creating more nuclear material, yet Trump’s policy is still we won’t allow them to have a nuclear weapon.  Sanctions alone will not restrain the Iranians from developing a weapon.  Something’s got to give.

It’s an open question whether the world would be a safer place or actually more dangerous if the Israelis were to attack and destroy the Iranian nuclear facilities.  What do you think?

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