- “Boris Johnson insists Covid lockdown decisions were ‘right’” – Boris told reporters that the purpose of the restrictions was to “reduce the huge numbers in the NHS”, according to MailOnline, and he insisted that he is “very confident” that the decisions made were the “right ones”
- “Moderna suing Pfizer over Covid vaccine technology” – Moderna is suing Pfizer in both the U.S. and Germany for patent infringement linked to the jabs, reports the BBC
- “Covid vaccine mastermind Dame Kate Bingham’s virus warning” – MailOnline reports that former vaccine tsar Kate Bingham has accused the Civil Service of “taking their foot off the gas” as they are relying on the existing jabs, rather than searching for new ones for the next variants
- “More evidence – as if it were needed – that ministers terrified the public into complying with lockdown” – Rishi Sunak has admitted that the British public was deliberately “scared witless” by the Government. “It’s a case of better late than never,” says State of Fear author Laura Dodsworth in CAPX
- “Sunak’s belated Covid confessions: A shocking indictment of a man without a moral compass” – “It does not bear thinking about,” writes Kathy Gyngell at the Conservative Woman, that the Chancellor of the Exchequer “sat on his hands knowing that the policy he supported in public was ruinous”
- “D.C. Mayor Says No Virtual Learning, Giving Unvaccinated Black Teens Zero Alternative Options” – Washington D.C. has a mandate requiring students aged 12 and over to be jabbed in order to go to school, the Daily Signal reports. And remote learning is not on offer
- “Mayor Bowser’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for D.C. employees is unlawful, judge rules” – According to Fox News, a D.C. Superior Court judge has ruled that Mayor Muriel Bowser’s coronavirus vaccination mandate for District Government employees is unlawful
- “Trump sought to pressure FDA on Covid vaccines” – A congressional panel probing the pandemic response has found evidence that Trump stalled the FDA’s plan to extend safety studies of the Covid vaccines, reports the Washington Post. Is Trump set up to be the fall guy when the public turns on the vaccines?
- “Pfizer’s Paxlovid Covid Pill Showed No Measurable Benefit in Adults 40 to 65: Study” – A new study has found that Pfizer’s COVID-19 oral antiviral pill Paxlovid appears to provide little or no benefit for younger adults, the Epoch Times reports
- “A Thousand Days to Flatten the Curve” – Eugyppius laments the news that Chancellor Olaf Scholz and the German cabinet have signed off the final draft of the Infection Protection Act. It would see the poor benighted country having to mask up from October to April
- “‘Double standards’: Why top German ministers are embroiled in a Covid mask row” – A row has broken out after Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Energy Minister Robert Habeck were seen flying without masks on a recent trip to Canada, the Local reports
- “Tossing the Elf Out With the Chump Change” – Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is the guest on the latest episode of the Ricochet Podcast where he gives Dr. Fauci his final grade
- “Fauci’s Covid Disaster: A Summary” – Over at the Brownstone Institute, Ian Miller revisits some of the “greatest hits of Fauci’s reign of incompetence”
- “What I Heard and Saw: Dr. Paul Alexander Speaks” – The Brownstone Institute’s Jeffrey A. Tucker interviews Dr. Paul Elias Alexander, who witnessed the chaos of the U.S. policy response to Covid first hand
- “Novak Djokovic’s vaccine ban is a disgrace to American sport” – “The greatest tennis player of all time, Novak Djokovic, is once again being victimised by pandemic-era stupidity,” writes Park MacDougald in UnHerd
- “Three-day wait for surgery after dog attack sign of a system in crisis” – A man’s 72-hour wait for surgery after a dog attack is emblematic of the crisis in the health service in Victoria, Australia, where, according to the Age, they are treating people in tents because the hospitals are full
- “Who will argue against the planet?” – “Climate change dogma always ignores the good news,” writes Maurice Newman in Spectator Australia
- “Lockdown and the price of suppressing dissent” – “We are standing in the smouldering wreckage of our elites’ terrible decisions,” say Fraser Myers at Spiked. “We have paid a heavy price indeed for suppressing debate and dissent”
- “Facebook just forced me to delete a post from a year ago!” – Steve Kirsch takes aim at Facebook, the “compliant speech” platform which has just censored a post he put up a year ago, showing data about vaccine injuries
- “‘The young can’t force their ideology on me’: how cancelled choreographer Rosie Kay is fighting back” – Rosie Kay was forced to resign from her own dance company after she was accused of transphobia, the Telegraph reports. But she has now launched a new company where she hopes to create “a safe space” where artists can work “without fear of being silenced, shut down or cancelled”
- “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans” – Nature Human Behaviour explains why it has developed some woke guidance aimed at protecting people who may be harmed by the publication of scientific research that is inadvertently “discriminatory, racist, sexist, ableist or homophobic”
- “Civil servants attend ‘Queer Leadership’ conference on taxpayer cash” – Civil servants in the Legal Department have come under fire for attending a ‘Queer Leadership’ conference, says MailOnline, despite Suella Braverman’s fightback against diversity training
- “We need a British solution to the global energy crisis” – “More domestic fuel is crucial to any plan to make available more and more affordable power,” argues John Redwood MP in the Telegraph
- “Thatcher still holds the key to fixing Britain” – “Individualism, freedom, the right to act and speak as you wish,” are more important than ever, says David Frost in the Telegraph. “That is why Lady Thatcher’s politics are still relevant in today’s Britain”
- “By pumping more oil, can Venezuela hope for a better future?” – Writing in Scaled, Ciarán McCollum looks at how the energy crisis in the West may turn out to be an opportunity for Venezuela
- “How governments and the cult of net zero wrecked the energy market” – “Putin may be the proximate cause of this crisis, but the reason we were vulnerable was an intentional policy to crush fossil fuel investment,” writes Juliet Samuel in the Telegraph
- “Nadhim Zahawi warns families they will have to save energy” – “The reality is that we should all look at our energy consumption,” Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi has said, according to MailOnline. “There is war on our continent”
- “Restore Trust in the National Trust” – Restore Trust Director Zewditu Gebreyohanes tells the New Culture Forum’s Peter Whittle why she wants disaffected ex-members of the National Trust to rejoin and vote for change
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I was going to say “This is almost beyond belief” but unfortunately it isn’t in these insane times. Has whoever is in charge of Dahl’s estate had any say in this? Or are they ultra-woke too and go along with it?
In any case, selling these books as being “By Roald Dahl” is now simply a lie.
According to the Telegraph article, the rights were sold to Netflix in 2021.
That explains everything.
Can this be challenged, because publishing rights should not encompass the ability to re-write someone else’s creation? This is not unlike the New York Times trying to re-imagine Harry Potter without J. K. Rowling.
It might still be possible to challenge on moral rights grounds yes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights
It seems like nothing is beyond belief these days.
Have they got around to Richmal Crompton yet? My personality, vile as it is, is based upon her foundation.
Funny – I never saw you as Elizabeth Bott!
OK, there’s a quantity of Molesworth mixed in.
What I read to my kid was greek myths, about Chronos devouring his children. It seemed to make him more affectionate.
Greek miths make kids tuough. as any fule gno. Fotherington-Thomas mum never tell him Chronos story. That why he sae “Hello trees, hello flowers”ect.
Medea comes to mind.
I suppose it’s nothing new, in that our school edition of My Family and Other Animals had dropped the line “that bloody boy’s filled the sodding bath full of bleeding snakes,” and edited out the Good Ship Bootle-Bumtrinket altogether. But there is a difference between a mild editorial hand for kiddies and a complete Bowdler job.
The interesting question is Will there, at some point in time, be firemen tasked with burning old books? Eg, I have a somewhat lengthy German history of battles of the first world war at home whose content is nowadays at least borderline illegal in Germany and Austria (and in Austria, not so borderline). For instance, one of them expresses the wish that the Germans (both those living in Austria and those living in so-called Germany) will hopefully unite in future to become invincible in war. That’s the kind of stuff people can go to jail for in the Austria of today.
While I think it’s important to keep such literature, isn’t there a big difference? The thoughts expressed by the German National Socialists were put into practice, whereas Roald Dahl fought the Nazis and he does not write as an ideologue. We seem to be in a situation where the unprecedented peace that has followed WW2 has made quite a few people unable to work out what is friend or foe, because they have no first hand experience. All previous generations for all of human history experienced plague, war and starvation. The recent generations are, in the majority, the first to have no experience of any of the primary challenges that their ancestors faced.
Why do you immediately come up with Nazis once something is mentioned which was the perfectly normal state of affairs (Austria being a part of Germany, originally a part of the duchy of Bavaria which got separated out for dynastic reasons) since about 936 until – again for dynastic reasons – this ceased to be the case in 1871. This useless split would have ended in 1918/19 if the right of the self-detrmination of peoples had been meant to apply to – well – peoples and not just Serbs and Czechs.
Better start training firemen if you want your lies (Nazi thoughts !!37) to prevail.
They really put the “Reich” back into Osterreich!
Ok, I’m going to be controversial here.
I’m saying:
Good.
I read all of Dahl’s books as a kid and enjoyed them all, I think. Years later as a parent I read them all again as bedtime stories. I found them to be xenophobic, misogynistic, chauvinistic, jingoistic and, worse than all that, mean-spirited, elitist and just not very good. This is one occasion when I’m happy to let the thought police do their work.
Why did you read them all again if you hated them?
Do you think everything you hate should be destroyed? If you do, you’re a barbarian. A civilised person would want to leave the books intact but put warning reviews for other PC foreigners on Amazon.
Because I enjoyed them as a kid, I think I said that. I don’t want them destroyed, I just don’t care that they’re being edited. And I stand by what I said, I think Dahl was not a particularly nice person and doesn’t deserve to be the national treasure we’re supposed to think he was. Just because the woke cultural revolution is abhorrent and stupid, it doesn’t make the aforementioned isms right for children’s books.
That’s a pretty complicated way of stating that they were written in the middle of the last century before all these really abhorrent isms of today were invented. For even more horrors for the modernistic mind, try Grimm’s fairy tales. They’re even burning evil witches in there. And – now the absolutely incomprehensible – the woke spiritus rectores read all of this stuff in their childhoods. Clearly, without the completely -istic(!) Roald Dahl, they’d never have turned into the man-hating monsters they are!
If you think that’s not what your children should be reading, then, don’t buy them these books. But that doesn’t mean you’re authorized to destroy them so that other people also cannot read them anymore.
You failed to mention the glaringly obvious fact that the woke/trans extremists hate women too ( think that traitorous Sturgeon creature ) and want to erase our sex, rights, identity and role in society. Just the fact certain imbeciles cannot even define what a woman is should be a fairly big clue about what they think of us. The two defined sexes are to be obliterated and replaced with non-binary, gender-fluid other-worldly beings apparently. And I thought men wearing make-up in the early 80s were pushing the envelope!
…I am of course referring to the music industry back then. Many singers/artists had bigger hair and more slap then women but they definitely were not all “batting for the other side” or trans, in my opinion.
Back then, male rockstars were doing it to prove they were soooooo masculine that they could get away with it without having their masculinity questioned. Or something.
I don’t want to destroy or ban them (or any other work). I don’t care when they were written – misogyny and xenophobia are unpleasant things to read to children. He very clearly didn’t think much of foreigners or women. So I’m not sorry that his works are now being edited by morons, I don’t see them as treasures I see them as derivative children’s books with nasty undertones.
Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater – just because we live in the age of woke, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t challenge discrimination. Those isms were not invented by millennials 5 years ago.
The future is what happens from now on. Because of this, it can be influenced in some way someone believes to be beneficial. The past cannot. And cries that it must be censored because people saw things differently back then than other people see certain things today are always wrong.
By editing them like that, they are being destroyed.
Blasphemy!
Actually I think if you read pretty much anything from previous centuries by our big name authors you could say the same thing. Even things written by well-known female authors, and this is because it’s a reflection of the era and the social norms and attitudes therein. For instance, to find something written by Dickens, C.S Lewis or even Shakespeare offensive nowadays is just plain daft and ironically is offensive as well. Our literary greats should be left the chuff alone, otherwise it’s a slippery slope and all authors from years gone by are fair game.
Ha ha! I know, I can tell from all the down thumbs! I don’t want to ban or censor any book and parents should read to their children whatever they think is right. I’m just saying that when re-reading Dahl’s books to my kids, I found them unpleasant. They felt misanthropic, classist, and yes – misogynistic. This was before the woke thing happened. There are plenty of his contemporaries whose works are not guilty of such things; I don’t think he liked people.
Incidentally, David Walliams, his wannabe supposed successor, is in a good position to take the mantle, because he’s also misanthropic and classist
The romance (politely put) between Lydia Bennet and George Wickham in Pride and Prejudice can pretty much be regarded as blueprint for liberating modern relationships — woman wants sex-life and therefore, joins up with man who wants one as well. The characterisation of both as morally inferior beings who end up sort-of salvated by a proper marriage ought to count as misogynistic for the standards of today.
Buy up original Roald Dahl books. But keep examples these new versions and perhaps put names against this vandalism.
“If you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.”
I’m so glad that we’ve got all of Dahl’s best books upstairs, unadulterated and much loved. I’m waiting for the wokester nutjobs to start on our beloved fairy tales and literary icons like Hardy and the Brontes. I’m sure Enid Blyton would get a ‘good’ doing over too!
This insanity should be against the law, surely?!
The only art, literature, sculpture, music and architecture that would be acceptable to the woke would be both moronic and ugly.
Probably that “modern art” crap that looks like a blind-folded chimp was let loose with a tin of paint. I like art that actually demonstrates skill, and charging thousands for a splodge and a squiggle isn’t it. A prerequisite for exhibiting at an art gallery should be to answer “no” to the question: Does it look like a toddler created it?
As Andy Warhol famously said, “art is what you can get away with”, lol.
I don’t think characters from the comics I read as a child would be spared from all this nonsense. How would Billy Bunter (The Fat Owl), Desperate Dan (a huge cow pie eater) or Keyhole Kate ( a nosey parker) be altered – or allowed?
I’m quite happy being a Boomer.
Well they’d have a field day with The Viz!
The Fat Slags were a personal favourite of mine…
Is Viz still any good? Mr Logic?, Black Bob’s binliner, and everything? Must renew my subscription.
Haha yeah, those two and Sid the Sexist, Big Vern and the letters page.
Used to get the annual – every year funnily enough – but haven’t for a while now. Not that I’ve grown up at all…
“Lenin allegedly said: “Give us the child for eight years and he will be a Bolshevik forever.” That could easily have been the motto behind this new vandalising of Roald Dahl’s oeuvre.”
St. Ignatius of Loyola would agree, as he said something quite similar as well.
That’s the real meaning of, “the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.”
Did Lenin copy Aristotle’s phrase of “give me the child until he is 7 and I will will give you the man”?
Woke = sleepwalking into tyranny
Maybe soon Dahl himself will be edited out and another person named as author?
The Woke censors think they are infallible, can never be wrong and have the ‘Truth’.
Like zealots they want to destroy and censor other ideologies and want only their ideology to be worshipped.
Finding it funny that under an article about censorship 8 comments have been censored! LOL Still shows ”35 comments”… curious..
So in the warped world of woke a woman is only worthy is she is a top scientist or running a business.
Stand in the Park Make friends & keep sane
Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am
Elms Field
near Everyman Cinema & play area
Wokingham RG40 2FE
These people have no souls, except when it, he, she, them begins with “R”
Woke is the culmination of a trend long in the making. I have a satirical book from several decades ago called “Politically Correct Bedtime Stories”, which is a collection of fairy tales rewritten in exaggerated PC lingo of the time. Interestingly, titles it featured such as “Snow White and the Seven Vertically Challenged Men”, would themselves not even get today’s woke stamp of approval and would have to be re-titled “Snow Caucasian and the Seven Vertically Challenged Sperm-Givers”!
In any case, the book was intended, and understood, as a satirical JOKE (Remember those?), forewarning of the kind of sanitizing of language that we see trending today in our linguistic milieu, edited as it were by the woke missionaries.
Nobody actually has to do this – there is no legislation providing that publishers must edit all meaning and humour out of their material. Leave literary material as the authors intended and you’ll probably make much better sales too! “Go woke, go broke” applies to Puffin as well.
Puffin? The Twits…
What happened to copyright laws? Imagine if I were to change a few notes and passages in a Beethoven Sonata. it would no longer be a Beethoven piece would it? Why is it any different here?
I dare these Stasi idiots to redact Mein Kampf! LOL