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Is the U.K. Government Invincible?

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Of course I’m taking about Boris. With each step on his journey he’s found to be wanting, he’s found to be lying, he’s found to be incompetent, he’s found to be making poor decisions, he's found to be out of touch, confused, passing the buck, over promising and under delivering, should I go on?

And yet millions of citizens in the UK voted for him to lead this country, to lead us into a pandemic of epic proportions, with an epic death toll, that is still rising every single day.

We gasped when even one person died from COVID19 and now we don't even bat an eyelid when the death toll totals 96 (on 20 July 2021).

Leadership in government globally has been the worst in decades, but how do we know this? We only need to look at Gareth Southgate, the England Football team manager or Jacinda Ardern, the New Zealand Prime Minister. Why can they be outstanding leaders but our governments can’t?

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Is human suffering totally and artificially predictable?

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The answer is a resounding yes! You and I have been contributing millions of digital actions to allow the likes of Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon learn about our likes, our dislikes, our shopping behaviours, our feelings, our relationships, our networking, our friends and our enemies and much more besides.

The data is colossal and the collecting of it all has been fierce for decades, because all these companies knew that one day this data could be harvested, could be interrogated and could be used to make predictions.

Let's just imagine that apart from retargeting or remarketing a technology that has ads follow you around when you browse the internet, ads are served up to you before you even have thought of it. Sounds unbelievable, well consider this.

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The Socials Love your Comments...

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Whether it's Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, Reddit, Pinterest, Messenger, Telegram, WhatsApp, WeChat or any other platform I might have missed, they all have one thing in common.

They need your eyeballs.

The more eyeballs, the more they can charge for their ads. The advertisers need eyeballs and will move to the platform which has the most eyeballs. Eyeballs = $$$ billions.

We're talking serious dosh here, the more controversy there is in the world, i.e. racism, covid, masks, vaccines or even Matt Hancock, the socials love it. They need controversy in the world, they need people fighting against each other, they need massive division.

So here's a theory for you, yes indeed it could be called a conspiracy theory. What if these platforms employ people to start the controversy on some platforms, let's call them 'Doom Influencers'. I know it sounds mad, but if your business is valued in the billions and competing with other billion dollar companies, then surely it makes sense to pay someone a small amount of money, somewhere far far away in a distant land, who can sit on their computer and just watch the controversies appearing in the world and make them even bigger.

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Could this be the end of English racism?

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Maybe the racists tweets following the England final with Italy were a gift? I know this will sound very controversial, but hear me out please.

Firstly it has meant a massive public outcry towards the racist abuse targeted at these wonderful football players who stepped up for their team and country, an event they will never forget for the rest of their lives!

It has meant that comments flowed from Royalty, Government and ordinary citizens up and down the country, the country that calls itself England. My mother was brown, she was from India and my father was white, he was from The Netherlands, I am sure she faced racism in The Netherlands but I was just not conscious of it. Can you imagine my Mum and Dad getting married in the days when mixed marriages were just not seen? What must it have been like for them.

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England Euro 2020(1) Final

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There are so many lessons to be learnt from watching England move through the Euros 2020, which actually was played in 2021, because of the Pandemic. Every team they faced, English men and women were nervous that they would lose the game, after all England never does well in major competitions or do they?

Gareth Southgate's management style is being hailed as superior compared to all previous managers that have come before and indeed it is. The team appears to be more cohesive, supportive and genuinely enjoy each other's company. Inevitably the pressure on manager, support staff and players must be immense. Having to play mainly in front of an English crowd who will cheer when you do well, but will sneer when you don't. The press is the same too, the headlines will be celebrating every win and destroy the team when they lose.

This year appeared to be different because England were not losing any games and had a clean sheet and made it all the way through to the semi-finals. England has been there before actually, it was the world cup in 2018, but didn't make it through to the final that year. This year and for the first time in 55 years England made it through to the final of the Euros in 2021.

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Are you responding like your parents or like your teachers?

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There are 2 role models that shape how we respond in life. Role model no 1, your mother or father and role model no 2, the teacher who gave you the hardest time or maybe several who did.

Usually the way we were treated, when our parents and teachers felt we had done something wrong and gave their response to it in the way of punishment, ridicule or showing us up in public, is the way you now respond to situations in life. In particular your reaction and response to your loved ones, partners, siblings and children. You basically are copying what they did to you, to now doing it to those nearest to you.

Just stop and think for a few minutes and consider how you treat your nearest and dearest when I’m your opinion they have done something wrong.

Maybe have a think about how you react to drivers on the road when in your opinion you believe they have done something wrong? A tiny bit of road rage, maybe a lot of road rage? How did your father react to drivers when he drove you around or maybe your mother? Did they curse at bad drivers, at certain models of cars, at cyclists, pedestrians, older drivers? Does any of this ring true?

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The Ugly Internet

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The Internet is getting uglier every year. Whether it is the amount of ads on websites, social media feeds and surrounding thumbnails, the cookie pop-ups on every single website with the worst and ugliest offenders being the news media and even government websites, it is getting worse. But you never noticed, because it has been creeping up on use steadily over the years. Just stop and have a mindful look right now at the website you are on. Not this one of course, this one (Medium) hasn’t yet been polluted. Maybe Ev Williams - CEO at Medium has learnt from his days at other tech firms?

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The Unknown

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Because of our conditioning throughout our lives by our parents, our teachers, business leaders, the government and ourselves, it means we can only function properly with what we’ve known.

When unknown situations arise like a global Pandemic, we can only resort back to what we have experienced in our lives so far. Our craving and clinging to how things used to be kicks in and our mind will stress continuously until such time that the known shows up again. That’s why so many people protest against lockdowns and their perceived removal of freedom.

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Bicycle

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I have been cycling from a very young age whilst growing up in The Netherlands, the whole infrastructure there means that the cyclist has a higher priority over motorised vehicles, which everyone respects because everyone is a cyclist, yes indeed without exception. There are more bicycles than people in The Netherlands, some might even say it’s a problem with so many discarded cycles all over. This would be a nice problem to have here in the U.K.

When I moved to the U.K. in 1977, I cycled with fear and today 44 years later I still cycle on U.K. roads mostly in the countryside where I live, but still with fear, huge fear.

The issues with cycling on U.K. roads can be summarised as follows:

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The Insolvency Fraud

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Whenever there’s a crisis in the world the fraudsters wake up big time! This current pandemic is no difference. Insolvency, debt, closures, stock clearances, company sales, you name it, if you’re a company you will be receiving a ton of these emails.

Most of the time you ignore, delegate to junk and delete, sometimes though it’s worth investigating who the fraudsters are and how they can have legitimate companies. Next time I wish to come back as an investigative journalist. I would love to do that work, but for now I only did a few tap, tap, click, click and discovered the small minded fraudsters.

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Great Joy!

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This is by far the longest scam email I have ever received. Worst still it’s almost perfect English and surprisingly my email service provider didn’t pick it up through its spam filters. I will be having a word with them!

Good day,

Please, do not take this message and information as joke because doing so is at your own peril / detriment. I don’t have much to say here but will make it brief and straight to the point for your quick action. I am sending this confidential message to you in private with utmost fear for my work, life and family.

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More than Spam!

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I received an unsolicited email from a company I have never heard of, called Spencer Humphries [warning — do not fill out their form!].

It was sent to my business email address. I have no idea who these people are, have no relationship with them. The subject line was, “Staying Alive (UK) Ltd — R&D Tax Credits Qualification”, which is indeed the correct company name. They must get the list from somewhere. See the main image below included in the email.

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What is PAI?

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PAI is a personal physiological activity indicator, based on heart rate data, combined with daily activity intensity and multi-dimensional dynamic comprehensive evaluation of personal physiological data, converted into an intuitive PAI value through an algorithm. It does not depend on a single item of data, while it allows you to have a comprehensive system to understand the physical condition.

Only a certain intensity of daily activities or workouts is required to acquire a PAI value. According to the research results of the HUNT Fitness Study *, keeping your PAI above 100 will help reduce the death risk of cardiovascular disease, and increase life expectancy.

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We’re not a team!

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The people in the U.K. have been remarkable. The vast majority of us have followed the rules, have respected the Lockdown, have socially distanced and continue to do so, wear our masks, have stepped up and taken the vaccine, plus many more sacrifices, including not receiving any financial support from the government whilst large corporates are receiving millions.

Other countries around the world are struggling, struggling with infections, not being able to roll out the vaccine that fast, being too optimistic early on and on top of all that have been struck by Covid variants, e.g. South African, Brazilian, Indian variants etc.

And now the promised unlocking process in the U.K. is under threat because the U.K. government have never been tough enough on incoming infections.

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Namaste

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On Monday 17th May, 2021, the U.K. will start to open up from Lockdown and officially we will be able to start hugging again. It’s hard to believe that we are experiencing a time when our Government has to give us permission to hug each other. I’m sure that parents haven’t stopped hugging their little ones and partners haven’t stopped hugging each other, well at least those that live together. I appreciate that older people in our society are desperate to feel a hug from their younger family members and of course why not?

Price increases during a Pandemic – are you really serious?

I sent the following email to an accounting software group from which we rent their ‘KashFlow’ accounting software. They are part of the Iris Software group. My email is self explanatory, the above table shows how the monthly rental has increased substantially since we started with them in 2015. My email below went to customer support and I copied in 6 of their senior execs on 29 April 2021, I’m yet to receive a response. The execs email addresses on their website were cloaked as Exec1@iris.co.uk and for each of them, they had a different number behind the word exec. Talk about being a number in an organisation!

Our human suffering dictates our direction of travel.

Every single human suffers in their life, it’s part of being a human. We make most of our decisions to avoid suffering. For example we swallow a pain killer to avoid pain and as such we become conditioned to swallow painkillers for the rest of our lives.

In the U.K. the sales value of over the counter pain killer drugs was 658 million* pounds in 2020.

*Source statista.com

British Politicians are a laughing stock!

The British public have always treated its politicians with disdain and the latest flat refurbishment scandal by Prime Minster Boris Johnson has caused a huge amount of public and media outcry.

Accusations of political donations monies used, the inappropriate timing and maybe even an illegal process are all swirling around Boris’ head.

His very clear answer is NO!