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.

American Hatred of Russia

Nuclear Confrontation

Is the US planting false flags — like the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which never happened, or supposed weapons of mass destruction, which didn’t exist — as an excuse to send troops into Ukraine or use tactical nuclear weapons against the Russians? Lots of specious and suspicious social-media comments that the Russians are losing and getting desperate, and so will try to use unacceptable weapons to even the score — false flags because the Russians are clearly winning the war.

Such false flags would mean that you and I are now at risk because of this confrontation between the West and Russia in Ukraine because now we are talking the potential of using nuclear weapons. Don’t think that Russia would not response to the use of tactical nuclear weapons against them.

US Sanctions Against Russia

Nutrition, A Soft Science

Nutrition is a soft science because it is in fact very difficult to prove anything when it comes to food. The reason is that everyone’s diet consists of a wide range of different foods, so that it is virtually impossible to show that for any specific food, here are the consequences, as all the other foods in one’s diet will have played a role too.

This is the reason why there is so much controversy in nutrition on virtually every point or aspect of different diets. It almost seems as if for any given issue, there will inevitably be “authorities” arguing for both sides of the coin. For instance, there is a huge debate in nutrition over how unhealthy, as in heart disease, saturated fat is — those who argue that it should be avoided at all costs and those who argue just as vehemently that it is harmless.

And also there is the camp that points out that correlation doesn’t prove causality, i.e., that two things happened to be very correlated could just be random chance and not causal at all. This is the argument that attempts to debunk many of conclusions drawn in the famous China Study that had such an impact on the course of nutrition as science (I don’t buy the argument here; I think the conclusions in the China Study are indeed causal). But in the absence of the type of concrete and irrefutable proofs that you can arrive at in other sciences, the argument that correlation isn’t proof has some weight.

And if this confusion of conflicting opinions isn’t bad enough to begin with, you must consider this: that not all the so-called “experts” on nutrition out there are speaking from a purely disinterested point of view where truth is the objective, but in fact are putting out ideas that support an agenda of a particular food industry. So you have pundits from the meat lobby throwing verbal grenades against the use of soy as a protein alternative because, according to these shills, it promotes estrogen in men! In fact, a huge percentage of the nutrition literature is pure propaganda from writers paid for and in the pockets of particular food industries. They are not telling you THE truth, but THEIR truth.

So what is the layperson to do with such a welter of contradictory and even perverse points of view in the “science” of nutrition? First, don’t give up. Second, keep listening to various experts and soon enough, you will find ones that are more convincing in their arguments. Third, when you have enough experts that you have come to trust, if they have common views about specific foods and specific diets, then that majority opinion among these experts that you have come to trust is what you ultimately have to go with. Not proof certainly, in the scientific sense, but definitely an educated guess.

My Experiment

My Experiment

I’ve been doing this experiment now for about 10 years in retirement. It has been an acceleration of what I was doing before retirement, as I have taken it to a much more intense level.

You see, I’ve grown a bit skeptical of the medical community being in a position to ensure my health. It seems what they offer relative to major illnesses and a general deterioration in one’s health is either pills (bandaids really) or surgery — not real cures.

Which brings me to nutrition. I believe that nutrition plays a huge role in one’s health. You are what you eat is literally true. And I think for the body to achieve maximum health, you have to feed it optimum vitamins and minerals. It’s just that simple. As the ancients understood, treat food as thy medicine. So instead of thinking that the medical community can safeguard my health, I came to believe that nutrition was the main pillar of health, not doctors.

As a consequence, the experiment has been to eat a diet that maximizes nutrition to as high a level as possible, which of course means that you have to have knowledge of nutrition. I’ve been reading about nutrition now for 25 years. I started reading about it in the mid-90s when I was seriously overweight and needed to find a diet that would help me lose the weight (a high fiber diet was the discovery then). So I have the knowledge, guided mostly by Joel Fuhrman and his Eat To Live treatise, but many other books and videos.

I call myself an “almost vegan,” as I’ll go for 6 months totally vegan and then 6 months where I eat a small amount of turkey, back and forth, but very little meat even when I’m eating the turkey (a single slice a day max).

I use cronometer and plan every meal precisely. I also do 19:5 intermittent fasting. My most recent major change has been to try to introduce more variety in my meals, so I started to use the service Leafside for their soups and sweet bowls, but even with those, they are just the starting point, as I add many and various nutritional powders to each to achieve true nutritional excellence. (Note: Leafside plugs their meals as nutritious certainly, but also very easy to make, which they are, but I didn’t go with them for that reason — ease of preparation. I just wanted to introduce a significant level of more variety in my diet with these 12 meals per month, as variety itself is a significant aspect of nutrition — the more the better. I also liked the endorsement by Michael Greger, a recognized authority on nutrition, so I knew from the get-go that their meals were of a high standard nutrition-wise.)

I’m always on the lookout to ratchet up the nutritional intensity of my diet, even with tiny little changes at any time. Now, what I eat on a daily basis is nothing like what anyone else is eating, I’m pretty sure. It is a totally unique diet that has never been done before — by anyone.

So the experiment continues.

Dragon Fruit

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