Hello @r_botman, all the CDN calling jQuery are needed to this counter works, effectively you and @PeteSharp have reason when you said that Blocs already have jQuery. But check here what @Norm said about custom brics:
So the only line you could take from code is this:
<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.11.2/jquery-ui.min.js"></script>
All the others need to be there to this snippet code works.
But for my experience UNTIL NOW I have a lot of references for this duplicated library and never had any problem with it…