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.

Dragon Fruit

Tried dragon fruit for the first time today. I didn’t know how to cut it up so I had to Google a video on that. You cut it in half and then peal away the skin. The video explained that dragon fruit is like bananas — the longer you let it ripen, the sweeter it gets.

Dragon fruit might be the most over the top food I’ve ever seen, from the point of view of how it looks. I can see where the name came from.

Have a recently opened Whole Foods near me and have been taking advantage of it to try new food — a kind of exploration.

Diet

US Sanctions Against Russia

They should drop the sanctions against Russia. The sanctions are going to hurt the West a lot more than they hurt Russia. Europe needs natural gas and foodstuffs from Russia. Europe needs Russia a lot more than Russia needs Europe because Russia can sell to China and India what they don’t sell to Europe. And Putin just declared that from now on, all sales in oil and natural gas will be in the ruble, not the dollar. So are we seeing the end of the petrodollar regime because of these sanctions? And I’m not even mentioning the gigantic inflationary impact that the sanctions have caused on oil and natural gas, which has a ripple effect on so many other products — so runaway inflation. And guess what, these sanctions antagonize the Russian population and so make them anti-American and even more supportive of Putin.

So, bottom line, these sanctions represent more stupid diplomacy by the US. How to shoot yourself in both feet with a single bullet — that’s US diplomacy.

Absence of Diplomacy

Propaganda

Americans are brainwashed about Russia. It’s both the government’s constant propaganda and the anti-Russia bias of the press. Americans don’t hear a balanced view about all things Russia. It’s a steady diet of very negative commentary, so it’s understandable that Americans are brainwashed.

But what’s dangerous about this brainwashing is that it allows the government to do whatever it pleases with regard to Russia. How dangerous can this be? One only has to remember Vietnam and the second Iraq war — countries destroyed and millions killed pointlessly. Yet conflict with Russia involves nuclear weapons. It’s an entirely different level of potential devastation.

Absence of Diplomacy

Corruption

What the press in the US doesn’t tell you is that the current government in Ukraine is the most corrupt in Europe — by far. (Some of this corruption involves Americans, like Biden’s son.) And this corruption has left the country extremely poor. Given its natural resources, Ukraine should be thriving, but the opposite is true — the consequence of all the government corruption. When Putin talks about the “bandits” in Ukraine, this is what he’s talking about.

Absence of Diplomacy

Zero Diplomacy

The United States has suffered from its lack of a true diplomat. The last real diplomacy to be pursued by the US happened under Nixon/Kissinger with their initiative with communist China. They realized that the US faced a menacing communist coalition between the Soviet Union and communist China, so Nixon, despite his anti-communism, did something about it. In an unprecedented and unanticipated move, he went to China and extended the olive branch to the Chinese — with the obvious intention of creating a fissure between the Soviet Union and communist China in their relations with the US.

That is called DIPLOMACY. It is a mixture of both vision and practicality — the vision to see what is indeed a better outcome than the current set of circumstances and the practicality to see how to make it happen. To be an effective diplomat — not a partisan ideologue pushing a questionable agenda — but a true diplomat, you need both. Missing either and you are spinning your wheels.

So how has diplomacy in the last 60 years or so been such an absolute failure? You merely have to look at all the current serious situations that have continued to fester without any clear resolution in sight to realize this. What are they? Not hard to identity. China/Taiwan; North Korea/South Korea; North Korea/Japan; Europe-NATO-US/Russia; Pakistan/India over Kashmir; Israel/Iran. The China/Taiwan situation has the possibility of bringing the US into a nuclear confrontation with China. North Korea/South Korea ditto. North Korea/Japan ditto. Europe-NATO-US/Russia a nuclear confrontation between the two sides. Pakistan/India colossal loss of life and economic devastation for the two countries and ultimately the world. Israel/Iran can bring the US and Russia into direct and inescapable conflict.

Very serious consequences for all of these situations. Yet there has been no diplomat worth his salt to come up with a vision and the practicality to resolve any of them, and these situations are all very long in the tooth — decades — and festering…perhaps “smoldering” is the right word here. Many of these situations, like the entangling alliances that led to World War 1, could lead to a world war that none of us could even imagine.

So where is our Metternich of the 21st century to lead the world out of its darkness and away from the abyss, away from a second Middle Ages and the destruction of our very civilization? Nowhere to be found. And the clock keeps ticking on all of these situations, like a bomb, a very big bomb.

Absence of Diplomacy

Absence of Diplomacy

NATO’s reckless expansion east to the doorstep of Russia is what has caused this war in Ukraine. Russia has been pleading with NATO since the questionable coup in 2014 for Ukraine to remain unaligned, but their pleading fell on deaf ears. So now we have war. A war that should have been avoided, had we had a single worthwhile diplomat in NATO/US. But there are none. They have ideologues, not diplomats.

A true diplomatic would have seen the far greater value in establishing congenial relations between Europe and Russia compared to further expansion of NATO — because to any reasonable person the former is much more important than the latter. Therefore, you do what needs to be done in diplomacy to ensure the better outcome. But that isn’t what our “diplomats” did.

And now the West makes the incredibly hypocritical claim that this war is Russia’s fault. Duh.

Likely Future Terrorist Targets

Nutrition’s Golden Age

This could be nutrition’s golden age, as it has become very apparent in the sciences that there’s an intricate connection between the nutrition in one’s diet and one’s health. Indeed, how could this not be so, as food is basically chemicals. When you eat, digestive enzymes break down the food into vitamins and minerals, which are then available for all the metabolic functions of the body, right down to the level of all the processes of the individual cell. Thus the very commonsense notion that nutrition and health are indisputably linked, and the obvious implication that the richer your nutrition the healthier you are likely to be.

And this golden age is given a boost as foods of all kinds in the developed world are readily available. Even out of season foods are available year round. So there is little in the way of devising a truly nutritionally dense diet that’s superior to any diets of past ages. You just have to have knowledge of nutrition — what’s good for you and what’s not.

But to what extent have the sciences taken this linkage between food and health more seriously with detailed studies about specific foods? For instance, it is a commonplace assumption in the nutrition literature that there are specific foods that are very beneficial to the health of the brain. I can think of three such foods off the top of my head: Omega 3 fats, Lion’s Mane mushrooms, and blueberries. If it were true that these three examples were indeed beneficial to brain health, wouldn’t it be instructive — and potentially rewarding — to determine exactly what chemicals in these foods produce which beneficial effects in the brain?

I think the next advancement in the science of nutrition will be at this level, where it is determined what chemicals in various foods produce what specific benefits in the body.

Diet

Diet

Put myself on a real diet for 3 weeks — new thing for me as I have never done any kind of diet before.

Idea is to have a calorie deficit from 500 to 700 calories compared to what I normally eat — each day.

So I’m on the 11th day and there has been absolutely no change in my weight, despite having serious overall calorie reduction. Strange.

Perhaps the weight loss will appear suddenly and sharply, as in, say, losing 2 pounds from one day to the next. The body has its own mind.

Canelo

Best Outcome in Ukraine

Best outcome in Ukraine would be if their military would lay down their arms and surrender. Otherwise, you have a Syria-type civil war that destroys the country with terrible casualties.

The Russian military has surrounded all the major cities, and has encircled the large contingent of the Ukrainian army that had amassed to attack Donetsk, but were beaten to the punch by the Russian invasion. This large mass of Ukrainian soldiers, estimated at 45-65k, faces annihilation. (Keep in mind Russia has tactical nuclear weapons that can take out an entire army with a single device — “tactical” in that these are much smaller nuclear weapons designed to take out a large contingency of soldiers all at once. If you are the leadership in the Russian military, do you engage this Ukrainian force near Donetsk with your own army and therefore sustain serious Russian casualties, or do simply annihilate it with this single device and therefore forego any Russian casualties? The temptation to use such a tactical nuclear device would be very compelling. That would be 45-65k soldiers gone or horrendously wounded in an instant.)

No way that Russia is not going to take back Ukraine from the clutches of NATO, as they see an unaligned Ukraine — without American missiles — as critical to the security of Russia. And, unfortunately, the Russian emphasis on “denazification” does represent reality — the current Ukrainian government is controlled by mobster-like thugs who took control after the 2014 coup. (Was that coup engineered by our CIA? It was reported at the time there were rooftop snipers who were shooting people on both sides of the street demonstrations to foment the situation. Were these snipers funded by our CIA?)

American military aid to support this corrupt government in Ukraine is making this best outcome less likely and an extended devastating civil war more likely. The ones who will suffer will be the Ukrainian people for no purpose.

As usual, thoughtless American foreign policy makes a mess of everything it touches.

American Hatred of Russia