So, what did I do in my six weeks of off? Well, I read the entire Harry Potter series, and very enjoyable they were too. I didn’t want to read anything political or anything ‘real’ and I’ve carried on reading more fiction since. I’ve just finished the excellent Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith. It is about a serial killer and is set at the end of the Stalin era in Russia. It is based on the story of the real-life serial killer, Andrei Chikatilo who murdered 56 people in Russia in the 1980’s and 90’s. I’ve also ordered the two sequels, The Secret Speech and Agent 6.

There are some statistics at the back of the book relating to Russia under Stalin that are chilling. The two that stood out for me are; it is estimated that 14.5 million people died during this time (the proletariat whom communism was supposed to free) and they would even execute children as young as 12. Absolutely brutal!

If the detail in the book is anything like it really was, the levels of paranoia and fear, it must have been hell for the citizenry. I remember in Wild Swans how people were the same under Mao, paranoid and ready to sell out their family, friends and neighbours, and how in the blink of an eye you could fall out of favour with the authorities and the dangers that brought.  The frightening thing about this is when I look around me today, I see we have learned nothing. It would take very little to turn society into that again, we are halfway there already. I’ve seen and experienced first-hand in the last year, how people who I thought had a modicum of sense and intelligence, completely caved into the fear and propaganda. I have been ostracised by family members for not taking the virus ‘seriously’. (What was I supposed to do, invite it around for dinner and talk to it?!) And the ‘covid cult’ has caused divisions that debates about Trump, global-warming and Brexit never even came close to.

I have also refused to wear a mask, (I will not be complicit in my own enslavement) something which pisses some people off. I think part of it is because it highlights their own cowardice - they don’t want to wear it but haven’t the nerve to go out without it. I tell people now I have a rare condition, it’s called CSIT, it stands for common sense and independent thinking, and believe me it’s a rare commodity around here, I just didn’t realise how rare!

The ‘covid cult’ also reminded me of the early days of the Troubles, especially Bloody Sunday, when a wave of collective insanity seemed to grip the population and which I’ve seen again this year. The change in society was palpable after Bloody Sunday, you could almost taste the anger and hate. Northern Ireland descended into darkness and fear, paranoia and brutality reigned, and every nut job with a grudge had an outlet in which to exercise it. There were also those who took advantage of the anger and the nut jobs, and used them for their own ends, financially and politically. The fear generated then still haunts NI, (they haven’t gone away you know) I see it when I post anything critical about Sinn Fein on Facebook, and it is collectively ignored.

People have remarked privately, that they thought I would be burned out or shot after my letters to the paper. I really didn’t care and knew they wouldn’t because what I have realised is that, underneath it all, Sinn Fein and the rest of them are just another bunch of cowards, who are just as corrupt as the rest and always were. If the last year has shown me anything, it is that all the ‘hard’ men around here are nothing more than a shower of gutless wonders. Pathetic!

Anyway, getting back to the books, I’m reading Carl Sagan’s Contact at the moment, (and hoping for a worm hole to open up to another galaxy!). I had started it before Lent but set it aside to read the Harry Potter’s. I will then get back to some of the heavier stuff which is starting to pile up. Next up is Solzhenitsyn’s, The Gulag Archipelago, for some real insights into life under Stalin and Nietzsche’s, Beyond Good and Evil.

It was good to take that time away from the world and switch off from all the hysteria and misery, especially when the government denies you the right to live your life. There’s another year gone which I’ll never get back. Man cannot live for work alone and neither can I.

The fear is also starting to recede and I can see people beginning to question themselves and their actions. The media are still doing their best to ramp it up, with all eyes on India, but with a bit of sunshine and people getting out and about again, the tensions are definitely easing.  Well done too, to all who turned out to march last week in London, it was great to see, especially for those of us living in the outer reaches with little or no support.

When you look back at history and read the literature, whether fictional or not, from the Roman Empire to the present day, you wonder why tyrants never learn and continue with their insane plans for world domination and human enslavement. Because, it doesn’t matter how successful they are initially, in the end, empires always fall and their leaders die, whether it’s Josef Stalin, Mao or Lord Voldemort. Could someone please tell the Rothschilds/ Rockefellers, George Soros , Henry Kissinger, Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates, the Democrats, the Zionists and Xi Jinping? It could save us all a lot of time and trouble, and spare us a lot of pain and misery.

Enslavement is not sustainable in the long term, not matter how brutal they make it. Eventually, some people tire of it and decide to fight back for freedom, to die on their feet rather than live on their knees. What is the point of a life, if you cannot live it as a free human being, especially when none of us are going to be here very long anyway!

The one factor that could have stopped Mao and Stalin was the people, if people had not complied with the orders and stood together, they could have done nothing. Because there are always more of us, than there are of them.

I watched a lecture of Dr Jordan Peterson’s recently where he talked about what a miracle it was that we existed, and how many pairs of males and females it took to successfully mate and produce a healthy child over thousands of millennium for us to be here now. Our ancestors in Europe have lived through the rise and fall of many empires, the Black Death, the Inquisition, famine, starvation, invasions and wars, and here we are cringing in fear with our face nappies, over a flu that has a 99.97% recovery rate. Just think about that for a moment then, grow a pair, take that rag off your face and man up, ffs!  

Vivir con miedo es como vivir a medias!

It's been a few weeks since I posted anything, but since there isn't anything other than the slow descent into technological and medical enslavement to talk about, there really wasn't much point. But irony of ironies, we now have Sinn Fascism telling us to wear masks.  4 months after '3 weeks to save the NHS' and NOW you need a mask. We've been given 4 weeks to get used to the idea before they make it mandatory, you couldn't make it up!! Well, actually you could because that is exactly what they are doing, and from the party whose military wing spent years running around with masks and guns, terrorising and traumatising an entire community?? Give me strength!!!

But I don't care who says it, I still won't be wearing one, I don't care if it's mandatory, compulsory or whatever, I'm not wearing one because a) they are completely pointless - a virus is so small you need a microscope to see it, it is one 10,000th of a millimetre and can easily pass through paper and cloth  and b) for health reasons - and as the propaganda says - it's not to protect me, it's to protect you -  because if you try and put a mask on me, you will get severely beaten. 

But I don't care anyway as my holidays are coming up soon and i'll be heading to England for a few days, for a nice change of scenery. I have to fly out of Belfast this time to Heathrow as everything going to Gatwick was sold out, making it a bit of a trek to get down to Sussex. But it'll be worth it, I'm sure.

I also started running recently, something I never thought I would do, but it just sort of evolved with being out walking so much, and I thought I would try the couch to 5k. I'm just starting my 3rd week and going pretty well, I managed to run for a steady 10 minutes on Saturday and could have run for longer but didn't want to push my luck. I won't be doing any marathons but I'll be quite happy if I can manage a 5k.

I've also been cutting back on the social media and the telly and been reading more, in between the crocheting, gardening and decorating. I finished Carl Sagan's The Demon Haunted World and also read Ron Kovic's, Born on the 4th of July. I'm on the last chapter of America:The Farewell Tour by Chris Hedges at the moment. The book is divided into 7 chapters, each dealing with a different aspect of the declining empire. I had to take a 3 week break after reading the chapter on Sadism, it was pretty rough and as Hate was the one straight after, I needed a break before getting into that. I don't agree with all his conclusions, but the final chapter titled 'Freedom' is a real eye opener into the depth of the corruption in the prison system or the industrial prison system. It is the best chapter in the book.  The prison system is the new slavery, there is just no argument on that and the corporations all have their dirty hands in the trough.  Did you know that all the McDonald's uniforms are made in prison by inmates getting paid a dollar an hour, if they are lucky, many aren't even getting a dollar. Think about that the next time you're chowing down on a Big Mac. 

But McDonalds aren't the only ones, all military gear is made by prisoners and here are just some of the other corporations using prison labour to boost their profits, usually done through sub contractors - JC Penney (or Primark to us), AT&T, Bank of America, Walmart ( or Asda), Procter & Gamble, Microsoft, Dell, Revlon, Johnson & Johnson, Fruit of the Loom, Quaker Oats and many more. It's a business and a very big business at that, and one I'll come back to but whatever you may think of the Black Lives Matter campaign, there are genuine issues of grievance within the black community to be addressed. However, poor whites are suffering just as much and these are the groups who need to unite to fight the injustice and exploitation. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening any time soon, we're badly in need of a Malcolm X or 2, (the last honest politician) but with everything that is going on at the moment, something has got to give, as we really can't go on like this. It's a question of where and when that first domino falls...lets hope it's soon.

Everyone today, is very clued up on their human rights, they demand that life live up to their expectations and when it doesn't, they start shouting about 'violations' of their 'human rights' and can quote verbatim from the section, sub-section, paragraph and line of the Human Rights Act.

We’ve come a long way from the days of Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft when ‘rights’ were nothing more than a middle-class aspiration, and while there is much that I agree with in their writings, overall, I don't actually believe in human rights. I don't believe that there are natural rights or God given rights, as a matter of fact, I don't believe we have the right to anything. The only rights we have are those we have awarded ourselves and when we award ourselves rights then, we are morally obligated to award those same rights to everyone, equally. We consider the Human Rights Act a sign of our evolution into a more civilised society and a demonstration of our moral and intellectual superiority. And like Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, the more we get, the more we want.  

We are quick to demand our rights, however, we are not as vocal when it comes to our responsibilities and are often quite happy to run away from or ignore them. The concentration on rights without the same consideration of responsibility leads to a skewed perspective and causes an imbalance within society.

Within the Human Rights Act, we have the Right to Life, the Right to Respect for Private and Family Life and the Right to Freedom of Religion and Belief but no responsibility to provide a counter-balance to them.

I do not believe in a ‘right to life’, life is not a right, it is a gift which we are very lucky to have, so alongside a 'Right to Life', I would put a responsibility - the responsibility to take care of and respect that life.

Alongside the Right to Respect for Private and Family Life - I would add the responsibility to ensure that a private and family life does not compel any member of that family to share in your belief system, if they choose not to, and also, that your behaviour as a family does not impact negatively on the community outside your family.

On the Right to Freedom of Religion and Belief - I would add the responsibility to ensure you do not force or impose your religion or beliefs on anyone else. Religion should be a private matter between the individual and whatever God they believe in.

Why do we believe that we have more rights than any other living organism on this planet? The demand for rights comes from the belief that we are 'special', more special than everything else on earth because we sit at the top of the food chain. This idea originally came from the book of Genesis, where God gave man dominion over the earth (which of course was written by man and has more than a bit of self-serving bias in it) and was adopted by religious institutions. From that, we were led to believe that the universe was created for us and we were, literally, the centre of that universe with everything revolving around us. 

In the psychological development of a human being, this is known as the egocentric stage, or egocentrism, and was first identified by the psychologist, Jean Piaget. This stage of development, usually occurs between the ages of 4 - 7, although, it can persist into adulthood for some (believe me; I deal with them all the time!).  It is characterised by a lack of awareness of different points of view - something which was very evident in the Brexit debate and which you can see any day in Parliament (and is actually the modus operandi in Stormont!!). It is a stage of development where a child/person is self-absorbed and still has to learn that things are not always from their point of view or perspective. When it persists into adulthood, it can be identified in people through their 'egocentric shortcomings' which include:

'The False-Consensus Effect - where people overestimate the extent to which their preferences are shared by others; (as evidenced by the ‘remain’ side in Brexit)

The Curse-of-Knowledge Effect - where experts in a particular domain fail to take into account the level of knowledge of laypeople with whom they are communicating; (or egosplaining, as I call it)

The Illusion of Transparency - where people exaggerate the degree to which their internal emotional states (such as anxiety during public speaking) are evident to others; 

The Spotlight Effect - where people overestimate the degree to, which aspects of their appearance and actions are noticed by others.' 

Or, in other words, it's all me, me, me, me, ME!!!

The universe is approximately 14 billion years old, earth is approximately 4.5 billion, man or a man-like creature is estimated to have been around from somewhere between 2 - 7 million years and your life, if you are lucky, will average 70 years. The life of a human being, in proportion to the life of the universe, is nothing more than the blink of an eye. You are a dust mote sitting on a quite beautiful rock which revolves around a glowing hot rock, in a universe whose size is beyond our knowledge and comprehension and, of which, we know very little. We don't even really know the basics - we know that there is a gravitational force in the universe but we have no idea what it is, or how it works, all we know is how it behaves.

Our tendency to egocentrism, often means that we lose our perspective on life and our place in the world. Our egos delude us into overestimating our importance and our knowledge and it can be a shock to the system to confront this reality and realise that, at the end of the day, we still don’t really know that much, we really don't matter very much either and if we disappeared tomorrow, the world will still keep turning and life will still go on.

Within the 'climate' hysteria that has gripped most of the mainstream media; the delusions of the ego are predominant.  Like Brexit, no real debate is allowed and the stream of propaganda continues, as those who are still in their egocentric phase refuse to consider any opinion but theirs, or consider that they could be deceived. 

I can understand and sympathise, if people only get their information from the mainstream media and believe that they are being told the truth.  There is a generation who were brought up to believe in the integrity of institutions like the BBC and NASA, to name but a few, and find it hard to comprehend that they are being lied to on such a grand scale, and believe me that scale is huge. I mean, I believed in it too until someone pointed out the truth to me, and it isn’t nice to have to admit that you were taken for a fool. I was a real ‘greenie’ and was quite happy to pay £3 for a light bulb, I used to pay 60p for. But, that’s life, it wasn’t the first time I’ve been fooled but it will most certainly be the last, I hope!

A few months ago, I tried to debate with a couple of people I know on 'climate change', both have quite large egos and one of them was flying to the US to protest with Extinction Rebellion (ironic or what?). But they completely refused to even consider any alternative viewpoint or read any of the literature I recommended. They chose wilful ignorance over scientific truth because it fed into their egos. 

Coincidentally, I took my mother to mass on Sunday and one of the readings was from Genesis, it was the passage where Adam and Eve are tempted by the serpent into eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which is one of my favourite  passages from the Bible because there is so much you can take from it and is probably one of the earliest writings on humans and consciousness.  So, I spent most of mass reading and re-reading this passage. There were several interesting things I took from it. One of the things I noticed about it was that, in this passage, God lied. Now, in all the years of being taught religion at school, no one ever pointed that out or questioned it.  The serpent asks Eve if God has told them not to eat from any of the trees, and Eve tells him yes, that God has said 'you must not eat it....under pain of death'. This is the lie which the serpent reveals. He tells her she won't die and that if she eats from it, her 'eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil'. So, with consciousness, we become the god of our own lives, we have the knowledge of good and evil and can then make a choice. 

The lack of curiosity and desire for truth and knowledge from the ‘climate change believers’, because it is about ‘belief’ and not scientific truth, shows that some of us prefer to live in ignorance, which is doubly disappointing in an age when so much knowledge is, literally, at our fingertips. Carl Sagan once remarked, 'knowledge is preferable to ignorance, better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable' and was a great advocate for scientific truth over superstition and myth.

I wonder what he would say now or how he would fare in the present day when science is being destroyed by lies and propaganda; when even the Nobel Institute has lost their integrity and real scientists are dismissed and silenced, in favour of an uneducated teenager, who is being cruelly set-up by her parents and paymasters. Would he too be side-lined and silenced?  Where lies the responsibility for truth now, is it with us to demand it as a right?

In searching for truth, I can only be grateful for the internet, for providing a gateway to truth and a different perspective. I dread to think how we would fare without it at the present time and the only advice I can leave you with are the words of another advocate for scientific truth, Benjamin Franklin:

"Believe none of what you hear and only half of what you see"

By the way, if you still believe you are the centre of the universe, or even if you don’t, because Carl Sagan is always worth listening to, follow the link and enjoy –

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIANk7zQ05w)

https://www.britannica.com/science/egocentrism

The universe is approximately 14 billion years old, give or take a couple of hundred thousand.  The Earth is estimated at 4.5 billion years old.  Man or a man-like creature is reckoned to be between 2.4 and 7 million years old and homo sapiens, from whom we’re descended (correct me if I’m wrong) have been around for about 200,000 years.  Not very long at all when measured against the age of the universe and according to physics, everything that is in the universe existed the moment it began.  So, we were at some point in the life of the universe, stardust.  Wonderful! 

‘Good morning starshine, the earth says hello’.  Pardon me, just having a little hippie moment there. 

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were launched way back in 1977 and it has taken the best part of 40 years to reach the edge of our planetary system and now they are zooming along somewhere in interstellar space at an impressive rate of 37,000 mph.  Even at that incredible speed, it is still going to take them 40,000 years to reach the nearest star, Alpha Centauri.  The vastness of the universe is beyond our comprehension and some planetary facts can be mind-blowing.  For instance, it takes Neptune 165 years to complete one orbit of the sun, amazing! But even more amazing is that even if Voyager reaches our nearest star, it would take it, (and this is incredible) 400,000,000 years to reach the other side of the Milky Way.  That is a distance beyond comprehension....and that is just one small galaxy in a universe of millions?????

 In 1990, when Voyager 1 was leaving our planetary system and heading into interstellar space, a distance of 3.7 billion miles, Nasa, on a suggestion from the writer Carl Sagan, turned Voyager around and took a picture of earth; ‘a pale blue dot’ Sagan called it. 

Carl Sagan wrote the great story, Contact, which was later made into a film with Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaghey.  It is one of my favourites and I strongly recommend it, especially if you like sci-fi or even if you just like a good movie.

So, back to us - the life of a human being is averaged at 3 score and ten, 70 years,  if you’re lucky, and many never even come close to this life span.   When that is measured against the age of the universe, it really doesn’t amount to very much at all, a mere speck of dust, a fraction of a blink of an eye in the vastness of the cosmos. 

So, here we are with our paltry 70 years, on this tiny blue dot rolling around the sun and what do we do with it?  In this eye blink of a life, we waste so much of it.  We waste it fighting in wars, over land, religion, money, power; making ourselves and everybody else miserable and afraid; scrabbling around like rats trying to ‘make a living’ instead of actually living; bitching and whining about petty stupidities, like what other people have, what we don’t have, how someone looks, how someone lives...

 We sacrifice the only life we have (I think) obsessing on nonsense and tying ourselves down to the slavery of capitalism; wasting precious time appeasing the forces of society, family and our own misguided expectations.

We allow others to dictate how the world should be and let them do our thinking for us.  The two most destructive concepts man has created, money and religion, have systematically robbed us of the experience of joy in this short life of ours and have created the greatest miseries ever inflicted, not just the human race but on all other life forms on this ‘tiny blue dot’. 

Is this really the best we can do with our precious time?