Do you make decisions with your mind or your heart?
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.
Student Loan Forgiveness
Loan forgiveness sets a terrible example. Implies that you can borrow money but don’t have to repay it. A better approach might be to allow early repayment that reduces the outstanding debt with a percentage increase in the debt retired, e.g., you repay $500 a month and this reduces your outstanding debt instead by $750 — an incentive to repay the debt early and get out from underneath faster.
Shoelaces
Humans have been to the moon and back, but are unable to create a shoelace that stays tied.
Military/Industrial Complex
The massive spending of the government on the Ukrainian war is just providing huge wealth to the military/industrial complex.
That segment of our economy was a key component before the Ukrainian war, but is becoming an even more dominant segment, which means our economy needs war to prosper.
Eisenhower will be rolling over in his grave.
Philosophy
Deal with it or it will deal with you.
War
The US economy needs war to thrive. Legacy all the way back to WW2 where we became the arms merchant for the allies.
Stoicism
Don’t just react emotionally. Think first, then act with deliberation after assessing your options.
The more you practice doing this, the easier it gets. Muscle memory.
Who Destroyed Ukraine?
US and Nato destroyed Ukraine with their anti-Russia policy. US promotes war everywhere because it is good for its defense industries.
Living in the US, with its pension for war, one feels a bit like a citizen of Nazi Germany who realizes that the country is being led by a madman, only here the madman is the entire government.
Reagan called the Soviet Union the “evil empire.” Today, we are the evil empire, with a sanctimonious press that endorses everything the war-mongering government does.
Proud to be American? No, embarrassed and disappointed.
Recipes
The trick to putting together delicious and nutritious recipes is knowing one’s own particular tastes. Most people have a vague sense of the tastes they like, but if you have a very detailed sense of the tastes that please you, you are in a much better position to put together ingredients in a dish that ultimately will be very pleasing.
For instance, I’ve discovered that I really really like the following: garlic, onion, slight and subtle curry, fennel, sour/sweet combinations, cooked tomato, walnut/almond/pecan, lemon juice on leafy greens, mint, basil, vanilla, chocolate, cinnamon.
Before I got into learning how to cook, I had no idea that these are the tastes that I crave, so that eating various dishes was at best a haphazard experience.
But now, I can use this self-knowledge to create recipes that, generally speaking, will be outstanding from a taste perspective — not because I got this outstanding recipe from a book but because I created a recipe that matches my personal taste profile.
Favorite Recipes
Veggie-intense casserole with vegan cheese — vegan cheese basically cashews and nutritional yeast. Baked Stokes purple sweet potato (keep the skin on for its nutrition) with cinnamon that sticks because of a coating of Tahini (tastes like cake, not potato, and can sweeten even more by adding a little Stevia). Veggie stew with a garlic/curry blend for predominant taste. Overnight oatmeal with vanilla flavoring (vanilla extract and vanilla powder) and blueberries and walnuts — almost like eating blueberry flavored vanilla ice cream.
You want to bake the Stokes sweet potato just long enough so that the skin on the outside is dry and crisp, but the inside is moist. 400 degrees for 55 minutes with large, buy-sized pieces.
The healthy fat in Tahini is perfect for potatoes because potatoes are naturally extremely low in fat.
After you bake the potato, put it in the refrigerator because this will cause the starch in the potato to turn into resistant starch. This resistant starch will feed your microbiome but reduce the calories you actually ingest.
When you want to eat a serving of the baked sweet potato, take it out of the frig and warm it up first at room temperature to eat it later. The resistant starch will remain resistant starch.
The two purple sweet potatoes that you MUST absolutely try are the Stokes purple sweet potato or the Okinawan purple sweet potato. Whole Foods has the former; you can order the latter from a Hawaiian company.
Purple sweet potatoes have amazing nutritional value, in part due to that color.
None of the other sweet potatoes compare favorably to the purple sweet potato, but always buy organic, as potato is always one of the Dirty Dozen.
Henry's Views 