- “What really happened in Boris Johnson’s Covid bunker” – The Sunday Times has an extract from Anthony Seldon’s new biography of Boris Johnson revealing what really went on in Number 10 during the first lockdown.
- “Death of meritocracy in Britain” – Historian Dominic Sandbroook comes to the defence of meritocracy in the Mail.
- “Dominic Raab’s exit is a victory for the Blob” – John Oxley in UnHerd says Dominic Raab’s resignation is a victory for the Whitehall blob.
- “Dominic Raab’s treatment shows why we shouldn’t subject MPs to bogus enquiries” – A readiness to remove politicians by non-democratic means sets a dangerous precedent, argues Dan Hannan in the Telegraph.
- “Are excess deaths on the increase?” – Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson take a look at the latest excess death data in Trust the Evidence.
- “Britain suffers cancer crisis after pandemic prioritised Covid” – Cancer operations were cancelled by the NHS on a scale seen almost nowhere else in Western Europe, with deaths from some types of the disease tripling, according to a new report. In the Telegraph.
- “Moderna hid serious side effects suffered by its Covid vaccine recipients when it reported clinical trial results for the shot” – Moderna scientists said in a 2021 paper no mRNA jab recipients in the trial had suffered “serious adverse effects”. In fact, 14 ultimately did, including three miscarriages. No placebo recipients did, says Alex Berenson.
- “New Pfizer Document – Pregnancy and Lactation Cumulative Review” – The Naked Emperor looks at the latest tranche of documents released by the giant pharmaceutical company.
- “Doctor told wife Covid jab was safe. Days later he died” – When Charlotte Wright heard that her doctor husband would be among the first to receive the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine she was delighted. Days later he was dead, she tells the Times.
- “Labs experimenting with deadly viruses risk 1.6m deaths every year, experts warn” – After fears that COVID-19 originated in a lab, virologists and biosafety experts gather in Geneva to discuss how to prevent another pandemic, reports the Telegraph.
- “Bye bye, BuzzFeed News” – Ten reasons why the Spectator’s Stephen Miller won’t be shedding a tear over the demise of BuzzFeed News.
- “The Macpherson Report changed Britain – but not for the better” – Thirty years on from the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence, elite identity politics have completely captured the police, along with numerous other professions and institutions, argues Mick Hume in Spiked.
- “J.K. Rowling in trans row with Left-wing lawyer over ‘stinker’ book review” – Jolyon Maugham KC lashed out at at J.K. Rowling after she mocked him for having a hissy fit on Twitter when the Times gave his new book a bad review. No prizes for guessing who gets the better of who.
- “Britain’s arts scene is as woefully woke as ever” – Hysterical luvvies claim the hated Tories are trying to suppress dissent in the arts, but third-rate, woke rubbish is still being subsidised by the taxpayer on a massive scale, argues Zoe Strimpel in the Telegraph.
- “What will Elon Musk do next now he has torn up the rules of Twitter?” – A year on from taking over the social media site, the billionaire rocket man has vowed to save us from AI, according to this profile in the Sunday Times.
- “Who is Kemi Badenoch? ‘Rottweiler’ about to step out of the shadows” – A feature in the Sunday Times about Kemi Badenoch, touted by many as a future leader of the Conservative Party.
- “The U.N.’s conflation of words with violence is dangerous“ – Andrew Doyle takes aim at the U.N.’s anti-hate speech initiative on twitter.
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“Where’s George? She wants spanking” became “She wants a good talking to”.
I’d sooner have a good spanking!
This is not amusing. This is an unchecked outburst of BTNHIWHDI!-syndrome seeking to destroy whatever cultural heritage these people can lay their hands on as that’s their only calling in live: Bereft of anything resembling creativity, the seek to hide this deficiency but turning everything into something so lame that even they could have come up with it.
[*] A software terminus technicus I invented. It means But that’s not how I would have done it! and usually manifests itself as rewriting of perfectly functional code in order to conform to someone’s function-free aesthetic preferences or factually unjustified technical prejudices.
“Uncensored Enid Blyton Books Kept Under Counter in Public Libraries”
That is bloody funny.
Enid Blyton up before the censors!
I suppose it had to happen. I probably read every Enid Blyton book as a nipper and those books so damaged my psyche I ended up ….
…here at DS.
A die-hard, right-wing, fascist, anti-liberal.
“Red ink for Blyton. NOW!!!!”
Note that there are books now out on the shelves and available for youngsters that wouldn’t have been available anywhere in the 1950’s, let alone ‘under the counter’.
But publishing house Hodder confirmed in 2010 that Blyton’s works would be refreshed in order to make them ‘timeless’.
In January last year, Jacqueline Wilson gave The Magic Faraway Tree a rewrite to remove “sexist expectations” of female characters, with domestic chores for the girls replaced with a lesson on gender equality.
And in February, Blyton’s Famous Five and Malory Towers books saw words such as ‘brown’ with reference to tanned faces, ‘queer’ and ‘gay’ changed to bring them up to date.
A description of “a brown-faced fisher-boy” was changed to a “suntanned fisher-boy”, while “Where’s George? She wants spanking” became “She wants a good talking to”.
No, Jacqueline Wilson, these changes do not make Blyton’s book timeless, but very much of this time, and in years to come the work of the “sensitivity readers” may come to look excruciatingly early 21st century.
I will say further that, just as there was a campaign to reclaim the cross of St. George from the far right, there now needs to be a campaign to reclaim the English language from the “far woke” and the psycho-babblers. I have related previously that I for one will refuse to use the euphemisms and made up words of these people (homophobe, straight, transgender etc.), and it seems to me a queer, sad world when “sensitivity readers” are instructed to butcher the sweet, gay stories of authors like Blyton. one dreads to think what will happen if these people come for poetry (indeed they arguably already have if you look at modern versions of some hymns).
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately
pleasure-domeWhere
Alph, the sacred river, ranThrough caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A
savageplace! as holy and enchantedAs e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By
woman wailing for her demon-lover!And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Five meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to
man,And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;
And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the
dome of pleasureFloated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny
pleasure-domewith caves of ice!A
damselwith a dulcimerIn a vision once I saw:
It was an
Abyssinian maidAnd on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of
Paradise.Used consistently the censorious / falsifying / ‘offense’ precluding approach being applied here would lead to the red-pen removal of every reference to slave cargoes in 18th century British shipping manifestoes and their replacement with barrels of whisky and crates of oranges.
In other words like all other tyrannical ideologies and movements this one destroys itself from within its own logic.
The fact is that Enid Blyton created timeless good versus evil fables (ie relatively defenceless children – plus Timmy the dog! – up against knife and gun festooned adult ‘wrong-uns’) – and that fundamental spiritual truth massively outweighs any relatively trivial archaic views on skin colour or gender roles (and even there Ms Blyton was relatively enlightened and broad minded).
Attempts to alter history are as dangerous as / fail in exactly the same way that lies about the present do.
Enid Blyton was already banned from my school’s bookshelves when I started primary school in 1980. Enid Blyton is the reason I became an obsessive reader. I had an old suitcase I took from my grandparents’ loft that was full of my Mum’s and aunt’s childhood books. Most were Enid Blyton books. I blasted my way through the Secret Seven books, got in trouble for reading Famous Five books at the back of the classroom when I was seven. I loved the so-called ‘Barney Mysteries’, the ‘…of Adventure’ series, Mr Galliano’s Circus, and the Faraway Tree. My Mum used to go to a second hand book shop and pile me up with ever more Blyton books. I whooshed through them, often draining torch batteries as a result of reading under the bed clothes well into the night. I’ve still got many of those old hardbacks.
Blyton presented a world where good children and adults were responsible, well-disciplined and moral. The stories were romances (in the sense of romanticism): good versus evil. Self-reliance, good manners, quick thinking and decency won the day. It’s everything the moral relativists and closet paedophiles who control the culture of the postmodern age loathe. It’s also easy to dig into the work of an author as prolific as Enid Blyton and find occasional stories such as Sambo and try to use them to paint all of her work with the cancel-culture brush.
There were changes being made to Blyton’s books as early as the 1970s, possibly earlier – Dick and Fanny being renamed ‘Rick’ and ‘Franny’, for example – but the dirty work really started in the late 80s and early 1990s when Noddy was rewritten and redrawn and Secret Seven and Famous Five stories were rewritten to remove references to characters’ races and so on.
Enid Blyton has been the obsessive focus of the left for longer than just about any other children’s author. She’s ideologically opposed to their views and, worse, children still love her decades after her death. And shame on Jacqueline Wilson for being involved in eviscerating her work. Blyton has to stand next to Ayn Rand as the dead female 20th century author the left can’t get enough of hating.
I’ve said for a long time that we need a change in copyright law (and the Free Speech Union actually needs to campaign on this issue) so that if a rights holder wants to rewrite a dead author’s work in the 70 year copyright period – effectively holding the originals hostage – the books have to include a ‘retold by credit’ on the cover and the original text must immediately enter the public domain, so anyone can publish it. It’s the only way to ensure an authors true work can continue to be enjoyed by the generations to come.
Excellent post.
I remember when all the ‘naughty’ books were kept on the top shelf.
Anyway, here’s my favourite Blyton-esque joke (and topical too).
Why has Gary Lineker got big ears?
Because Noddy won’t pay the ransom.
Ba-dum-tisss
The BBC would pay it for him!
May I suggest an ‘update’ to another book, far out of date in language and content, ‘Das Capital’..?
How about ‘Mien Kampf’
The thought of a sanitised and acceptable version of that book raises a smile. What a great challenge for a woke editor! I was going to suggest they have a do at de Sade, but chances are they’d find nothing that they wanted to change.
Here’s a challenge! “1984” censoring that book would be the biggest contradiction in terms ever!
Doesn’t particularly fit in here (except that we absolutely can’t do without something anti-German for more than 5 minutes, can we?) but this has long since been done in Germany, namely, when the copyright of the original text expired and the so-called free state of Bavaria could no longer legally prevent other people from republishing it.
I regard those authors as nazis not germans. Germans are fine people!
The ultimate far out of date books are surely the Koran and the Bible (and other religious texts).
Deliberately destroying childhood
Stand in the Park
Make friends & keep sane
Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am
Elms Field
near Everyman Cinema & play area
Wokingham RG40 2FE
Noddy has been in the firing line for decades, as I remember. The worst thing about the series is its goblinism.
I agree, Noddy doesn’t deserve all the years of goblinist hate speech he’s had to put up with!
And big ears! The amount of disgusting macrotism he had to suffer, well!
As a child I did not like Noddy because he did not say please and thankyou.
Anyone else see a similarity between the 1930s book burnings & public library censorship?
Farenheit 451 happening without the public flames.
Spot on BB.
Fahrenheit 451 didn’t anticipate digital books and the ability to hit ‘Delete’! The most terrible thing about the far left is that they can’t cope with the idea of something that has different views from them existing in the same world. It seems to cause them psychological trauma.
Very few titles, in percentage terms, are read 100 years after they were written. Should Sambo the Golliwog still feature in Noddy books.? Should every word, especially if they’ve fallen out of use, or changed in meaning like ‘queer’ be protected.?
I can see why people would suggest that, but this isn’t that. It is rewriting the books wholesale to change their meaning and message. I think people even as young as five can recognise that what happens in a story in a book isn’t real life. Knowing that ‘Sambo’ exists as a character in a book, but also knowing that you dont use the term for black people at school or in the street is a lesson in itself isn’t it.?