The defund the police movement has made cities unlivable. Witness today’s attack on a NYC subway.
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.
Ukraine War — Current Status
Not Easy
Nothing is easy.
Roubles, Not Dollars
Since Russia demanded to be paid in roubles for their natural gas and oil, the rouble has rebounded from its US-sanctions low and gotten all the way back to even. So one might say that the sanctions have proven to be a failure. And perhaps, worse than a failure, in that they have caused huge inflation in the West — because of the absence of Russian commodties — and even called into question the continued support for the petrodollar regime of the last 50 years.
The Russian also pegged their rouble to gold. So are we seeing the re-emergence of a gold standard and the demise of the all-powerful dollar?
Sugar
Sugar addiction is very common now, as the food industry when they took out fat and labelled everything “low fat” to get customers compensated by adding sugar to everything, which of course is a health disaster for the American public.
I always check the ingredient list of everything I buy and specifically the little subsection where they indicated whether there is “added sugar”. I want to see a zero there and even the claim on the package “No Added Sugar”. Some food companies are getting the message that added sugar isn’t healthy and are moving in that direction now.
More Ukrainian Lies/Propaganda
The Ukrainians are creating fake battle scenes to incriminate the Russians with the West and bring in the West into the conflict. Don’t buy it.
Neocons in Foreign Policy and Nuclear War
The neocons in foreign policy in the State Department won’t stop their endorsement of the unlimited expansion of NATO until we have a nuclear confrontation with Russia. Their obvious objective — a holdover from the Cold War — is to destroy Russia and break it up into small parts. But the ultimate result will instead be nuclear war.
What we really need in the US is a type of diplomacy that can see both points of view in any dispute, and that can see the greater gains to be had in peace and prosperity in the spirit of seeking compromise with our supposed adversaries. That sort of diplomacy has been sadly missing now for decades. It is seen as weakness, even though it should be seen as strength.
Misinformation
There’s a lot of misinformation in the West to the effect that the Russians are losing in Ukraine, when the reality is that they have encircled the Ukrainian army in the east, and it is just a matter of time when this Ukrainian army is either destroyed or capitulates — and when that happens, it’s over.
So why all this intentional misinformation? To make credible the false flag that the desperate Russians are resorting to biological weapons. This would bring in the West into the war.
House Divided Cannot Stand
Taking a cue from Abraham, we can see the only solution to civil war in Ukraine is to divide the country along ethnic lines — ethnic Ukrainians and ethnic Russians — and create two separate countries. Nothing else will avoid inevitable civil war, as the ethnic Ukrainians hate the ethnic Russians living in the current version of Ukraine.
Should Russia take over Ukraine, which I think is likely, this scenario poses a bit of a problem for them. If they create two separate countries, the country with consolidated Ukrainians will no doubt have tremendous animosity toward Russia. So would Russia create such a country, knowing that the new Ukraine will be an arch enemy?
What Russia will probably do is minimize the size of this new and much reduced Ukraine (possibly ceding parts of western Ukraine to Poland and Hungry), and come up with some kind of mechanism to prevent this small shell of a country from considering entry into the EU or NATO in the future — the main Russian objective in all of this recent history.
Snipers
Who were the snipers during the coup in Ukraine in 2014? Still, no one knows.
Henry's Views 