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.

Teas

I started to drink tea in earnest about 1 year ago — for the first time in my life.  Went through dozens of different teas to find the 3 I’ve settled on for now — Traditional Medicines Organic Hibiscus — interesting berry like taste, Gaia Herbs Liver Cleanse Herbal Tea (Licorice root, Dandelion & Peppermint) — my favorite taste wise, and Whole Foods Organic Lemongrass Bergamot Green Tea — very nice refreshing taste but both the Bergamot ingredient and the green tea have spectacular health benefits.   I would recommend this Whole Foods green tea to anyone because of the Bergamot.  

I don’t like tea without adding the Stevia for the sweetness.  My teas have to be sweet for me to enjoy them.  Without the Stevia, I wouldn’t like any of these teas.  But the rub on Stevia is that there is one recent study that using Stevia, particularly in excess, may damage the gut bacteria in the large intestines, although there are earlier studies that say it is harmless.  So who do you believe?

I’ve found that drinking a cup of tea is a good way to deal with sudden hunger if you want to avoid eating, so it can help with intermittent fasting. particularly at the end of one’s feeding period when it is so easy to go overboard with food.  Drink tea instead and the hunger may well pass.

Cardamon

Canelo

I was watching a video of Canelo in the gym punching the heavy bag. He was concentrating on heavy-hitting hooks to the body, with both hands. Really trying to hit the bag as hard as he could. Punch after punch.

What he wants to do with that body punch is plant his feet and get maximum leverage in a hook to the kidney area. That is his power punch (reminds me of Micky Ward). It is Canelo’s game winner.

But it is also his maximum vulnerability because when he plants his feet to throw the body punch, that’s when he is most stationary and vulnerable, as his focus is on hitting his opponent’s kidney area, not on his own defense, particularly with regard to a counterpunch head shot from the opponent.

Can You Take It?

Salt

Reading Fuhrman’s Eat For Life. Has a very interesting section on salt. Views salt from the evolutionary perspective of what humans in the bulk of their existence have taken in, that is, just the salt in the food and nothing more. That’s the amount our bodies through all those perhaps millions of years the human body is accustomed to need.

But then he compares that to the modern diet where everyone adds salt to virtually everything, so our current salt intake is spectacularly above where it should be. So we eat way too much salt compared to what we should be consuming, but worse, that amount of salt changes one’s taste buds to having to expect virtually everything one eats to be salty. So the current modern salted diet has radically changed the modern taste buds.

Only by drastically reducing salt can someone eventually get back to taste buds as they were meant to be, where one can pick out the more subtle flavors of various foods.

So the current heavily salted diet leads to high blood pressure and poor health, but also undermines one’s sense of taste. Goes on to say that his Nutritarian diet will lead to this reawakening of one’s true taste buds, and so you will get much more enjoyment out of actually tasting a variety of unsalted foods.

Easy Health Tricks

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