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.
Little-Known Fact
Interesting and little-known fact about our federal government is that, until the income tax was introduced, the government paid for itself by imposing tariffs on foreign goods.
Free Trade Isn’t Free
Democrats think free trade — where the US doesn’t use tariffs to protect domestic industries, as Trump did with steel and aluminum — is good for the country, but they don’t get that it produces unemployment in those areas affected by cheap foreign imports, and what you end up with is a huge rust belt of poverty and hopelessness. Free trade isn’t free.
Diverse Meals That Look Alike
Every meal I make looks identical. On top is a thick layer of leaf greens diced finely and sprinkled with real lemon juice. So what you see is this mound of green. Every dish the same. Because, from a nutritional point of view, those leafy greens are the all stars. They are in a different league than anything else. You do yourself a disservice not to include them in every meal…and in some quantity.
Liquid Meals
Most people are more accustomed to chewing their food than having liquid meals, yet when the food is pulverized in a smoothie, it may be that digestion improves, as the food has already been broken down to a large extent and is therefore more accessible in terms of its nutrition.
Which Camp?
Which camp are you in? I’m firmly in Beyond.
How To Eat
Like your life depended on it — because it does.
My Brown, Not Green, Smoothie
I consider the smoothie I make in a large Vita-Mix that lasts up to 3 days one of my most nutritious meals. That smoothie and a huge salad that also lasts days are the basic infrastructure of my overall diet, as they are both done virtually every week.
The ingredients that go into this smoothie have been added incrementally over the years so that now making one is quite a complex operation where I have to keep many things in store and ready to add. The same is true of the salad, but with the salad there is much more variability, as I like to eat at least a slightly different version each time. Here using different dressings helps that variability.
I think most people should do the same, that is, develop a complex and super nutritious smoothie as well as a complex and super nutritious salad, and make these two staples the mainstay of your diet.
Hilary’s World’s Best Veggie Burger
It may be.
Terrible At Governing
Democrats are almost a year in office, with control of both houses, and still haven’t passed the infrastructure bill that everyone, including all Republicans, wanted.
The bonanza bill to spend money on “clean energy” boondoggles will require huge increases in taxes and result in vast government waste on projects with little chance of actually affecting climate change or energy production — a case of government deluding itself into thinking that it can change our use of fossil fuels, for they haven’t admitted to themselves that the alternative sources of clean energy like solar and wind will never really amount to much percentage-wise. That’s the hard reality. Currently, all the renewable energy sources produce a mere 12% of total US energy consumption. I suppose that could eventually get to a whopping (sarcastic here) 15%.
Has anyone asked the question whether we really need to send our 3 and 4 year-olds to school? Whether this is really in our and their best interest? It smacks me of robbing toddlers of their carefree childhood.
The one idea that the Democrats have put forward that has real merit is the required 15% percent minimum tax on corporations. Long overdue that the government put a stop to corporations that make billions paying no taxes because they have an army of tax attorneys who can game the system.
So what have been the real downsides. We have a government that incentivizes illegal immigration. Our border with Mexico is chaos. We have witnessed a terrible exit from Afghanistan that encourages all our adversaries to see the US as a paper tiger. We now have a government that offers Europe no barrier to dumping steel and aluminum into the US — back to Democratic policies that lead to a rust belt in the US and loss of jobs, all for the sake of “free” trade that ultimately corrodes our economy. In other words, relative to trade policies, the Democrats have learned nothing.
Henry's Views 