Some Signs of Being Poor
it’s no sin to be poor
but it’s no great honour either
working down the pit was the only work to be had
Out on my walk today something got me to thinking that, despite the misery imposed upon us by all the COVID crap, my life is so much easier today than it was when I was a boy. Back then most people were were poor, life expectancy was short, and nobody cared about foreign travel because only the ‘jet setters’ could afford it. Hardly anybody owned a car, all the men in my village worked at the coal mine, and all the women were housewives.
Some things from back then that the youth of today would not even believe;
- Winters were cold, and we only had one open fire to heat a Victorian 3 bedroom house
- In the winter, ice formed on the inside of my bedroom window
- The toilet was a brick outhouse down at the end of the yard
- There was only enough hot water to have 1 bath a week
- I went to Bog Row Junior Mixed and Infants School
- The best meal I got all day was the ‘school dinner’
- I walked to school from aged 5 until the day I graduated aged 18
- I got no ‘pocket money’ until I got myself a paper round
- I only had one change of school clothes, and one pair of shoes
- There was only one channel on our tiny black and white TV
All of the above are true for me, and not necessarily the worst of it.
The worst of it was being so hungry I’ve chewed newspaper.
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jack collier
jackcollier7@talktalk.net
just a boy in short trousers
Chronic Stress, Anxiety, and Depression
many of the casualties from the coronavirus will be from preventable chronic stress
the torment of chronic stress can kill you
It’s very difficult for me to write this. I’m confused, fatigued, and fearful. Who would know that 475 days of enforced isolation could do this to an otherwise healthy person?
For more than a year I’ve been prevented from seeing my friends, going anywhere, or enjoying myself in a normal human manner. For more than a year I’ve angry, anxious, and distressed, and for most of the time I wouldn’t admit that to myself or to another person.
Although I knew I wasn’t ‘right’ nor ‘healthy’, I didn’t know just how bad it was until I booked a (perfectly permissible), short break in the Mediterranean sunshine of Gibraltar. Just booking the trip filled me with apprehension, but then it got worse. I had a severe panic attack; insomnia, nausea, confusion, sweating, headaches, and memory loss.
All of those and more physical symptoms can be attributed to chronic low-level stress and anxiety. What I had done in merely booking a short trip to get me out of this place was to allow my mind to write a cheque my body wouldn’t cash.
I need help to recover, and I know that with some support I can get over this whole coronavirus insanity.
Of course, if I tell our National Health Service any of this I will be instructed to go into strict self-isolation for 10 days.
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jack collier
jackcollier7@talktalk.net
it’s Catch-22
you are damned in you do
and damned if you don’t
Monochrome Monday ~ Dystopia
are we doomed to live in the dystopian dictatorship forever?
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jack collier
jackcollier7@talktalk.net
international travel is banned
our borders are closed
Inalienable Rights
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness
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To any right-thinking man it is self-evident that governments are created to protect our unalienable rights ~ freedoms endowed upon us by our creator, and which supersede any man-made laws. These natural rights include; the right to think for oneself, the right to life, the right to self-defence, and these rights remain throughout one’s lifetime.
From the beginnings of common law these were rights which could not be surrendered to the sovereign or government, and were independent of any and all laws. In fact any contract or law that tries to alienate such rights would be inherently invalid. There is no act of submission by which man can give up the state of a free agent and enslave himself, for by doing so he would lose his humanity. He would cease to be a man.
This was the entire point of American Independence, the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, the abolition of slavery, and in the case of we English the regicide of Charles I in 1649. Go further back and read the second and most important book of the Torah and the Old Testament, and you will see that the Exodus is also about these same inalienable rights.
And yet, the governments of the supposedly free western world have been using the peoples’ dumb acquiescence to take away these God given rights, on the grounds that it’s for our own good.
Let us leave aside the really big events, things which drove a coach and horses through all of our freedoms, things such as; the Prohibition of Alcohol, Income Tax, the Draft during the Vietnam War, and England joining the European Union. Instead let us consider the petty restrictions that officialdom has imposed upon us because of the non-existent threats of the COVID-19 virus;
- house arrest for months
- a prohibition on meeting other people
- compulsory wearing of useless face masks
- compulsory frequent testing for the coronavirus
- compulsory vaccination by threats and intimidation
- the closure of bars, pubs, restaurants, theaters, and churches
- a total prohibition on travel, which is only now being slowly lifted
Actually it’s worse than all that, there has also been a vast propaganda campaign to convince us that the coronavirus is a threat to civilisation as great as the Black Death, and an insidious creeping censorship of the news media.
Once given these controls over the general public, governments and their lackeys will not easily surrender them. Not any government, not ever.
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jack collier
jackcollier7@talktalk.net
the County of Oxfordshire is about to ban smoking outdoors
you couldn’t make it up
Leadership
a real leader does not court popularity and consensus
In May 1940 Winston Churchill was not popular within the government, he was seen as a rebel within parliament, and not that many of the ordinary ‘men in the street’ even knew who he was. Yet Churchill knew something that even his own king wasn’t prepared to admit; Hitler and the Nazi party were the very personification of evil. There could never be a negotiated peace with Hitler’s hellish regime. England would have to go on and on fighting Germany, even though there seemed very little prospect of victory. Eventually, through sheer vision, oratory, and force of personality W.S. Churchill carried the government, parliament, the people of the United Kingdom and the World with him to victory over the evil empires of Germany and Japan.
But then, Churchill was a true leader.
The men at the top of the United Kingdom and the United States; Boris Johnson and Joe Biden, are not leaders. They are mere mouthpieces for their cabinets and special advisors, with one eye on public opinion and the other on whatever populist cause is making the headline news.
Boris is in thrall to his squeeze Carrie Symonds and her far-left extreme green views. The man who once said that wind farms ‘couldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding’ has now committed Britain to a legally binding target of reducing carbon emissions by 78% of 1990 levels by 2035. You can tell how insane this is because Greenpeace have described it as the ‘boldest move by any world leader…..’ Boris has also caved in on everything the nutty academics from Oxford University have told him to do when it comes to the coronavirus and lockdown. The man isn’t even a paper tiger.
A God without wrath, without intimidation, without punishment, without Hell? It would be a paper tiger, a teddy bear! ~ Bangambiki Habyarimana
Come June Boris Johnson will be schmoozing with Joe Biden, another green freak who is expected to announce swinging carbon cuts for the USA at the UN Climate Change Conference in November, or maybe at the G7 summit in June. Good luck trying to drive across your state in a Tesla, and forget central air in your home. (Just check how much the price of gas has risen since Joe took office.) President Joe also showed himself to be at best a geriatric fool when he commented on the trial Of Derek Chauvin while the jury was still out. But then Joe’s history with the KKK shows that he knows all about racism.
We would have to go a long way to find a real leader today ~ unless we consider Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, who leads only by example.
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jack collier
jackcollier7@talktalk.net
the Queen has lead the country and the Commonwealth for almost 70 years
It’s a Mad, Mad World
it’s a crazy world out there ~ be a rational anarchist
how long before we see these scenes again?
Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse along comes the penultimate act of the presidential election in the United States. Depending on who you want to believe the ‘occupation of the capitol’ was either a peaceful protest gone wrong, or a violent insurrection presaging another American Civil War. Patriots or Anarchists?
The best thing I’ve heard is that President Trump has been banned from twitter. The truth of it is that nobody with even half a brain should ever use twitter in any way, shape, or form. Twitter is merely the modern equivalent of the washroom wall.
Here in Blighty our parliament has approved the latest tranche in our never-ending lockdown ~ to last until the end of March. Today, England is now in lockdown day 290.
The compulsory wearing of face masks, lockdowns, and now mass vaccinations ~ any student of history who has even so much as glanced at the literature on the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 knows that nothing governments and the medical professions do is going to make much difference to the numbers infected, and the people who sadly get very sick and die. However, here in England the over-zealous police are gleefully throwing their not inconsiderable weight around as though they alone know how to control the coronavirus. Woe betide you if you leave home without a very good reason, or you get caught without a face-nappy, try to drive to McDonald’s, or have a visitor in your home.
It’s always the way that if you grant someone in uniform a little authority they will tend to abuse it. Give someone in uniform an inch and they will try to recreate George Orwell’s 1984.
The insane saga surrounding the mass vaccination programme here goes grimly on. It seems that each consignment of vaccination doses has to be approved by some bureaucratic nonsense called the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency, and that approval process takes three bloody weeks per batch. Those first in line for the jab are the over 70s, but there are only 7 mass vaccination centres around England. How many over 70s do you know who still drive? Madness.
Some say that Boris Johnson is doing a marvelous Job. And that our Health Service is the best in the world. All I know is that I’ve stopped believing most of what I see and hear in the news.
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jack collier
jackcollier7@talktalk.net
Marmaduke doesn’t want to get arrested
No End In Sight
England will be closed down for months to come
some would say that’s being flown the wrong way up
Despite flashes of official optimism following the first vaccinations against the coronavirus, it would seem that there is no end in sight to the manifold miseries of lockdown, self-isolation, and national shutdown. Scotland faces a national shutdown from midnight tonight, and there is no doubt that Prime Minister Boris Johnson will very soon follow suit for England. He is making a televised statement at 8 p.m. this evening, and Parliament is being recalled on Wednesday this week, presumably to ratify whatever draconian new measures are announced.
Even harsher coronavirus measures than before will mean that UK borders will be closed, international travel stopped, all stores except food stores and pharmacies will be shut, all schools closed, any and all household mixing will be banned, and people will only be allowed to leave their homes for one of a specified list of essential reasons, such as food shopping.
Despite these draconian emergency measures the numbers infected with COVID-19 will keep on rising, and more and more people will die. There is nothing politicians, health officials, or medical science can do about it. The coronavirus will mutate faster than vaccines can be developed to prevent each new strain. Once a virus is loose in the general population there is no way short of Divine Intervention of controlling it. And, who’s to say that God didn’t inflict this on the world?
The virus will eventually burn itself out, as all pandemics do. But, this could take months or even years. Until then we will all just have to suffer.
Good luck to us all.
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jack collier
jackcollier7@talktalk.net
best to bar your door and fort-up ’til spring
Didn’t get to go
papers please
So I got to the airport, got as far as the gate, and I am not going to Cancun. Slightly upsetting. I live in a police state. The nazis treated people better than this.
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jack collier
jackcollier7@talktalk.net
No chance
Coronavirus Vaccine
better the Devil you know than the Devil you don’t
It seems that truckloads of Pfizer / BioNTech’s Covid vaccine are on their way from Belgium to the UK, where use of this brand-new miracle cure has just been approved by our medical regulator. Already our Prime Minister and Health Secretary are claiming that the end to the pandemic is in sight, and that the vaccine would ‘allow us to reclaim our lives and get the economy moving again…..’
I’m not holding my breath. The initial delivery of this particular vaccine will comprise of 800,000 doses, and given that two doses are required 3 weeks apart this tranche will treat a maximum of 400,000 people. Allow for logistical problems, wastage, people not turning up for the second dose after the rather nasty side effects from the first injection, and I predict that maybe a quarter of a million people might be properly immunised.
On top of that there are already arguments about who should be treated first, with some saying it should be care home residents and staff, while others insist the first to get the vaccine should be front-line health workers. That should be fun, the National Health Service has a staff of 1.4 million. The population of the UK is said to be 67,886,011 people ~ really? In which case put me down to be inoculated sometime after the first 67 million.
An effective and safe vaccine usually takes more than 10 years to develop, this Pfizer vaccine is hitting the English streets after only 10 months. This new vaccine is said to be 95% effective. Really? The most effective vaccine in medical history to date is the Tuberculosis vaccine which is proven to be 89% effective, while at the other end of the scale the vaccine against the Rotavirus is only 35% efficacious. The vaccine we are all supposed to have for measles is 69% effective. So, I don’t believe the coronavirus vaccine will be anything like 95% effective.
Anyway, why bother at all? Some 1.64 million people in the UK are said to have been infected by the coronavirus, or about 11% of the population. Really? There are so many false positives as to make the number of stated infections laughable. Of those infected 59,051 have died, or 0.08% of the population, and even those numbers are so massaged as to be meaningless.
The dry run for the mass vaccination programme is being called Exercise Panacea ~ how appropriate.
Many doctors, nurses, and other health professionals state privately that they will not be submitting to this vaccination. Neither will I, not ever.
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jack collier
jackcollier7@talktalk.net
this vaccine will prove to be a Frankenstein’s monster
Chaos Theory Sucks
it’s disorder, not a decision
this rather chaotic artwork is in the Getty Villa
Here in England we are being governed by Chaos Theory, The Butterfly Effect, and the Chicken Little Syndrome. Princess Nut Nut, (aka Carrie Symonds), has an unwarranted influence on the Prime Minister, and Michael Gove has lost his marbles. On leaving the European Union we will have an energy policy completely based on offshore wind farms, and an agriculture policy written by green activists who have never even got their hands dirty. The official response to the supposed coronavirus pandemic ranges from hysteria to blatant propaganda, all based on whatever the ‘scientists’ say today.
It’s all a bit Kafkaesque, George Orwell, and the Book of Revelations. It could be worse; I could live in the Police State of Wales, where pubs are not allowed to serve alcohol.
Amazingly, I am now handling all of this insanity surprisingly well. The social distancing, limited support bubble, no hugging, no sex rules don’t affect me much. I live alone in my seaside garret, I recently broke up with my long-term long-distance ‘friend’, and my only family is somewhat estranged. However, I do feel for those trying to live a more ‘normal’ life. There is frustration and tragedy out there ~ I can imagine how I would have felt if I was prohibited from visiting my dying father in his care home, and I can imagine how I would feel if I was prohibited from meeting my girl-friend. There was a ’70’s movie called No Sex Please We’re British it’s not so funny anymore.
Back in the day my life was utter chaos, governed by the butterfly effect, all overlaid with a semblance of order. I had a mantra; I am an utterly cool guy, living a really great life….. And if you know anything at all you know that any man who has a mantra like that is drowning in a sea of troubles and confusion. Up until last week I was beset by doubts, fears, frustrations, jealousies, and resentments ~ and that was just the chaos and turmoil running around in my mind like a frantic hamster-wheel. Up until last week I was mired in a slough of despond.
The really smart people eventually realise that their life is fucking shit, and sooner or later do something about it. The snag is that whatever you do is going to involve some pain and loss. Completely breaking with chaos hurts.
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jack collier
jackcollier7@talktalk.net
tunnel vision is not a solution to anything
JackCollier7 
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