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.

United States of America

The country went south with the Kennedy assassination and all the lies in the cover-up, and it has never really recovered.  Really has been just a police state ever since, and all this talk now about a sinister “deep state” surprises me not at all.  I’m only surprised how surprised other people are.

When Caesar was killed, his assassins didn’t hide in the shadows and pin the blame on someone else.  That’s what happened with Kennedy.  And a cabal from the government and the mafia pulled it off.  Even more shocking, the government then was complicit in concealing who had committed the crime.  That should tell you the deep state can commit heinous crimes and you will never know about it — because that’s what happened with Kennedy.

J.D. Tippit

LBJ

Down the JFK Rabbit Hole

My Story

Moonlight

Silver moonlight dapples the furtive wood elves —
All indistinct, glimpsed, perhaps only imagined,
Just as vague recollections flash by in the mind,
While it searches in vain for anything tangible.

In the moonlight that is recollecting,
The mind touches a weathered door that creeks open,
Revealing dimly the dusty furnishings of a bygone age.
Mere sight or sound or smell stirs vague memories,
Hinting at experiences hiding in the past.

But one wanders in the moon’s faint light,
As in the past, without clear sight,
So leave the moonlight to the owls and the ravens, you say,
And the past to itself, alone and forgotten,
For this bright new day.

All Poetry — Henry Barnard

My Story

Carbon Removal Techniques

The so-called Green New Deal is from lala land.  It presupposes that fossil fuels can be replaced by alternative energy sources such as sunlight, wind, etc.  Problem is those alternatives barely make up a small fraction of the total, and far from being reduced, it looks like the use of fossil fuels is actually accelerating — China, for instance, doubled their use of oil in just one year in 2016.  So the real issue is how to deal with the amount of excess carbon in the atmosphere despite this acceleration, despite the use of fossil fuels, which are here to stay for the foreseeable future.

A more practical approach — that might actually achieve something — might be removing the carbon from the atmosphere.  Can we tackle the climate change problem by filtering out carbon from the air around us?  The link below explores the practicality of this approach in some detail.

I also think we must come up with solutions for capturing the carbon before it is released as a gas into the atmosphere.  This would be for both cars with their exhaust pipes as well as for factories with their chimneys spewing the stuff into the air.  A carbon tax might be made so costly that private companies would see the cost/benefit of investing in a technology that would allow them to trap the carbon instead of releasing it as a gas.  Ditto for cars that continue to spew the gas out of tailpipes.

There should be a national Plant A Tree program to get each family involved in exploiting this natural remedy.  Trees inhale carbon and exhale oxygen — what am I missing?  Isn’t that a real solution and not from lala land.

Carbon Removal Techniques

My Story

Price Fixing

I’ve been situated in the same location now for some 7 years and have consistently tried to get service from Verizon for television and internet access, but to no avail.  Verizon is  simply not available anywhere in my area.  The service that is common in my area — you see their trucks everywhere — is Comcast.

Which makes me wonder how much indirect price fixing there is between Verizon and Comcast, not in terms of making their prices more or less equal but higher than would normally be the case — your garden variety price fixing — but in terms of a covert agreement between the two giant cable companies concerning which territories each will have absolute control over because the other agrees not to offer services in that area?  So now I’m paying Comcast more than twice the cost if those same services were supplied by Verizon.  Obvious price gouging.

And stepping back a bit for this issue of territoriality, there’s also the issue that these same cable companies offer their services, not based on a fixed price for everyone, but based on YOUR zip code.  Isn’t that also a form of price fixing?  The car companies do the same thing.  The price of a Toyota in Kalamazoo is different from the price in Boston, i.e., richer locations end up paying a premium.  More price fixing, in my opinion.

But where is the government to look into these abuses?  Nowhere to be found.

My Story