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.

Bleeding Hearts

Bleeding-heart liberals live in a land of make-believe where everything is black and white, a bit like TV back in the 50s and 60s where the good guy, dressed in white, always prevailed against the bad guy, dressed in black.

They, the liberals, are always the good guy, on the side of justice and everything noble and blameless, no matter how foolish their ideas and how horrendous the consequences of those ludicrous ideas may be.

These liberals are particularly susceptible to anyone’s sob story. Give them a sob story and you are half way home to having a diehard ally on you side, no matter how ridiculous the sob story may be. And that’s where the simple-minded liberal really goes off the rails because he or she ends up aligning themselves with any number of never-do-well scoundrels out to hoodwink them with a sad — but very imaginative — tale of woe.

Guns and Abortion

Easy Health Tricks

First thing I do in the morning is drink a half glass of water, as I wake up slightly dehydrated. But instead of just plain water, I put in a few drops of chlorophyll. It is supposed to clear out metallic toxins in the body.

When I drink my black coffee in the morning, it isn’t exactly black. I have this concoction of turmeric/ginger/cinnamon with a pinch of pepper. I add a half a teaspoon of this to the coffee. All three ingredients are supposed to have wonderful anti-inflammation properties.

Bread Again

Guns and Abortion

Half the country loves guns, and the other half hates them. Same with the abortion issue. So in both cases, nothing will change. Deadlocked.

I find myself completely ambivalent about abortion, as I can see the points of view of both sides, which leaves me completely undecided.

As to gun violence, I don’t see America ever leaving guns behind like GB did. After all, guns are actually protected by our Constitution.

So these incidents with crazies going off and killing innocent people will continue to be our Achilles heel well into the foreseeable future.

Guns and abortion — two issues that will cause endless and tremendous rancor with no resolution in sight.

The End

Muscle Loss

The older I get the more I want to withdraw from the world and find peace and tranquility.  When you get into your 70s, there are some nasty things happening that remind you the clock is ticking.  One of them is muscle loss.  That happens very quietly so that you hardly notice it, but then one day you realize you don’t have the strength you once had.  But with one’s mortality knocking at the door, why be so caught up in world affairs when one’s opinions really make no difference at all?  So to be obsessed with what is going on in the world seems more and more like a waste of time.  

Original License Plate

Food

Watching the series “Alone” on Netflix. The entire program, the contestants are talking about how they are starving and need to find food, so it is probably not the best TV to watch if one is watching how much one is eating. But I do find it a fascinating series. Kind of explains what travails early man — the caveman — would have been facing. The constant and unpredictable search for food. They don’t really know how long homo sapiens has been around. Estimates run from 1 to 2 million years. And then there was our immediate ancestor homo erectus — for a few more millions. Our current civilization is only about 3000 years old. Just a tiny fraction of the overall time we’ve been here. So the relentless search for food, like animals in the wild currently, was our lot for most of that time.

5-Day Mimicking Fast

Bread Again

I’ve been frustrated with commercially available bread, as I’ve wanted to move away from eating wheat and breads loaded with sugar). Not so much because of the glutan, but because wheat has been so modified in the last 100 years that it is the classic hybrid food (or said another way, is it food at all?). But if you look at commercially available breads, even those that call themselves “Rye Bread” or “Oat Bread” or whatever, the first and therefore biggest ingredient is always wheat. So who are they kidding? So I decided to try to make my own bread and nix the wheat. Ordered a bunch of different flours from Amazon, including walnut flour. But then, wouldn’t you know it, I discovered a commercially available bread that in fact does NOT include wheat and has zero sugar — even has some flaxseed and iodine (guess I’ll be making muffins with all that Amazon flour). This one:

Wheatless Bread

5-Day Mimicking Fast

I just googled the amount of protein an active man’s body actually uses each day, and it came in at 56 grams. So if I’m doing less than 20 grams of protein per day on this 5-day mimicking diet, then each day the body has to scavenge for at least 36 grams. Times 5, that’s 180 grams of protein that the body will have to break down from internal resources. At least, that logical.

If it were a water fast for 5 days, that would be 280 grams. So that would be the difference between the two — 100 grams of protein.

So while this mimicking diet hasn’t done much for weight loss for me, it may still do a not insignificant amount for autophagy, in my opinion.

The key is keeping that amount of protein per day extremely low…the lower the better. Next time I do this, I’m going to try for less than 15 grams per day. Not easy as even celery has some protein.

Learning

Can You Take It?

One of the most valuable things a boxer can have is a tough chin. If you can take the biggest punch your opponent has to offer and just shake it off, that’s gold. It means you can walk in and have at it with immunity.

When that happens to a fighter during the war in the ring, when he takes what he knows is the other fighter’s best shot and survives it with ease, that’s when a fighter can really become aggressive and go after his opponent relentlessly — because there is little to fear.

So, paradoxically, a very defensive ability turns into pure offense.

Beliefs