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.

Food Order

The best thing to eat before your larger meal begins is a handful of mixed nuts and seeds. Eat these 10 minutes before you begin the main course. They will be high in both fat and protein, and fat and protein will slow down the digestion of the carbohydrates in the main course so that you don’t experience sharp insulin spikes, which is what you want. They will also increase satiety so that you end up eating less.

The worst thing to eat first is bread. That will do the opposite — cause a tremendous insulin spike and make you eat even more than you need to.

So get into the habit of first eating a handful of mixed nuts and seeds when you sit down to eat — before anything else.

No Salt

Tribalism

Humanity has never really gotten above simple tribalism. What is nationalism — to which we are all addicted — but a modern version of ancient tribalism?

We all seek the protection of belonging to a group, even if this is pure fantasy. [providing little or no true protection.

Tribalism is our human heritage. We cannot escape it.

Strengthen Character

Tariffs

The US has a terrible imbalance in trade with Europe, Mexico, Canada, and of course China. Much of this is largely due to the fact that these other countries impose severe tariffs on American products, and so these products don’t get sold there.

What Trump is doing by imposing tariffs is to even the trading field so that the US doesn’t have these terrible trade imbalances. In a real sense, that these other countries are using punitive tariffs on American products forces Trump to do what he is doing.

Trump is a businessman, and businessmen want lots of international trade. Given his druthers, I actually think Trump would prefer entirely free trade — no tariffs at all. But what he will not tolerate are these trade imbalances because, in the end, they make the US poorer.

Trump is known as a deal maker. He sees himself in that light. His book is actually titled “Art of the Deal”. Imposing tariffs is his first move in trying to lower or neutralize foreign tariffs against American products. The second move will be the negotiation with each country on setting up equitable or no tariffs.

Trump

Cuts

In the last 12 years — retired — I’ve learned how to cook, mostly getting instruction from Youtube videos. To my surprise, I love cooking — just love it. I spend a lot of time each day planning the OMAD meal of the following day, and use cronometer.com to do that.

But what I now know about cooking is there is a lot of dicing of food with sharp knives — an incredible amount of chopping for every meal. So the question I have is to what extent the best chefs of the world suffer from cuts, probably some cuts that can be severe, given the sharpness of their knives and perhaps the need for haste for food preparation in a restaurant?

I suspect that getting cut is a very common occupational hazard for the top chefs, and something that happens on a fairly regular basis. Just speaking from my own experience.

Tasty Veg Casserole

Suppression

I felt a wonderful sense of relief and gladness the other day. It was so strong that it was almost alarming.

What I realized when this happened was that for the longest time, perhaps forever, I’ve kept my emotions so in check that it amounted to suppressing them constantly.

That raises the question to what extent one should restrain one’s emotion. Restraint means acting more rationally in the face of adversity, but it also means, to a certain extent, not really living.

So it is a dilemma. My constant suppression means that I have been able to navigate difficulties with rational reactions, but have I really lived? Not really.

Discipline

Hardest Part

Hardest part of growing old is maintaining one’s strength. You need weight training/resistance training to maintain your muscles. And you need to do that with discipline.

Many older people either don’t know that or they don’t have the discipline, so they end up feeble in old age.

95% Do This