Pub landlady defies police orders and puts five golliwogs back on display to applause from lunchtime drinkers just days after six officers seized 20 dolls in 'hate crime' probe
An old controversy. It is a bit odd, though. There is no doubt that the dolls are a caricature of Africans. So the do-gooders are actually demonizing African features?
There is a history of the Golliwog here. It was in fact an American invention. Excerpt: "Childhood toy, lovable rascal, cheeky jam mascot; how can anything that innocent be regarded as racist? That is certainly the view of many who were brought up with golliwogs"
Incidentally, Derek Laud is a black British political speechwriter who is quite happy with his nickname as "Golly" (The usual abbreviation of "Golliwog") . But Mr Laud and his friends are conservatives. Unlike the Left, they have a sense of humor
I had a golliwog myself when I was a little kid and regarded it with some affection. Was that wrong of me?
A pub landlady today defied authorities and put more of her golliwog collection back on display just days after 20 of them were seized by police as part of an investigation that she and her husband had committed a hate crime.
Benice Ryley proudly placed five of the controversial dolls behind the bar of The White Hart pub in Grays, Essex, which she has run for the past 17 years with her husband Chris.
The couple, who are in their 60s, had six officers enter the pub last Tuesday and take away 20 dolls displayed on a shelf behind the bar after an anonymous complaint was made against them.
They also seized an assortment of golliwog badges and magnets that adorned the bar.
As she placed some of them on a shelf, she told MailOnline: 'The whole thing is ridiculous. It's political correctness gone out of control. I'm not going to let the authorities intimidate me and I'm proudly putting my other gollis back on display in the pub.
'I'm still shocked that six officers came to my pub last week, surrounded me and took away my collection of golliwogs. I've not committed any crime and haven't set out to offend anyone. These gollis are a part of the pub, the customers love them, and they are reminder of our childhood.'
Ms Ryley also posted a notice at the entrance to the pub warning customers that golliwogs are on display inside and that they should not enter if this will offend them. The sign declares: 'We have golly dolls displayed inside on our shelves. If you feel offended. Please do not enter.'
She added: 'The police took 20 of my golli dolls but I've got plenty more of them upstairs. If people don't like them and feel offended by seeing them then they don't have to come into my pub. It's as simple as that. I'm not going to give into this crazy political correctness. We have customers at this pub from all different races and none of them have ever complained about seeing my gollis on display. Why did the police get involved in this?'
The White Hart pub is located on the edge of a council estate in Grays notorious for crime and drug dealing.
Ms Ryley and other regulars fumed that police rarely attend when called out for 'real' crimes and slammed the presence of six police officers who removed the golliwogs from the pub.
Two others waited outside while their colleagues placed the dolls in plastic bags to take them away.
Her husband was away in Turkey at the time with police informing her that they wish to question him for a 'hate crime' when he returns as he is the licensee.
Home Secretary Suella Braverman is said to have been furious about the approach, and has told Essex Police that bosses should be focusing on catching real criminals rather than seizing toys.
The issue of whether the dolls are racist or not often sparks fierce debate. The golliwog was created by Florence Kate Upton in 1895 in her book 'The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a Golliwog', where it was described as 'a horrid sight, the blackest gnome'.
After the author created the golliwog, it became a favourite for collectors and was popular in the UK as the mascot of Robertson's jam.
But by the 1980s, it was increasingly seen as an offensive racist caricature of black people.
Some people hark back to fond childhood memories of the dolls, whereas others argue golliwogs are a racist icon of a bygone age.
In a YouGov poll last year 53 per cent of respondents said they thought selling or displaying golliwogs was 'acceptable' compared to 27 per cent who did not.
Asked if it was racist to sell or display a golliwog doll, 63 per cent of respondents said it was not, while 17 per cent did.
Ms Ryley said: 'Surely the police have better things to do. If they arrest my Chris when he gets back, I promise you, the world will know about it.
'I totally agree with the Home Secretary. The police need to focus on real crime and not worry about what dolls people are displaying.'
Pub regular Sue Payne, 57 said: 'It's absolutely stupid and a complete waste of police time and money. You can get stabbed or mugged around here and the police won't come or if they do, it'll be after ages. But somebody complains about some dolls and six officers turn up. You couldn't make it up.'
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Damn the politically correct censors of great art and literature
Greg Sheridan
The idea of rewriting classics to make them conform to the prejudices of today is so spectacularly dumb, so epic in its nuttiness, so complete a form of cultural madness, that it illustrates perfectly George Orwell’s observation that to believe certain things you have to be an intellectual, no normal man could be so stupid.
Even Shakespeare productions have been bowdlerised to avoid offensive words and ideas. Yet The Merchant of Venice was in part about anti-Semitism, race relations are the backdrop of Othello and don’t even begin on the countless ways The Taming of the Shrew offends contemporary sensibilities.
But Shakespeare was the supreme genius of human literature. Are we really so deranged we would censor his words from 400 years ago so we don’t have to endure insights from the past? Are our insights today simultaneously sublimely perfect, and incapable of withstanding exposure to anything different?
Like many others I was most enraged at the ridiculous practice of the publisher in censoring and rewriting Enid Blyton’s books. Primary school children today have to put up with gender fluidity training, if their parents get pay TV they can turn on Game of Thrones and watch endless debauchery and violence, but we protect them from such shocking Blyton dialogue as “Shut up” or “Don’t be an ass!”
The very appeal of reading something from the past is that it’s different from where you are now. Very early in life I discovered that books can take you anywhere in the world, not only anywhere now but anywhere in history, and, given the power of the human imagination, to many places that don’t even really exist. Now we want to cancel literature’s magical visa.
Enid Blyton’s books were the first books I read from cover to cover, specifically the Secret Seven. I read some of the Famous Five but didn’t fall in love with them. The series that most stirred my childish soul was the Five Find-Outers.
Almost everything I liked about it would now, I suspect, be up for censorship. Maybe it has been censored already.
A distinctive joy of literature is unexpectedly finding yourself in a character, or an outlook, an idea or person you instinctively identify with. For me, this happened first when I read The Mystery of Tally-Ho Cottage, when I was about eight or nine. The group’s leader is Frederick Algernon Trotterville. His initials form the word FAT. He first meets the kids destined to become his fast friends in the series’ first book, The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage.
The others don’t like him much at the start. He’s fat, clever, conceited, talks too much, eats too much, likes his ginger beer, he’s a know-it-all and more than a bit bossy. Naturally, I loved him.
Even as a child, my natural shape resembled a potato. The idea that a smart-talking fatty could be a hero was terrifically appealing, perhaps the basis of the rest of my life.
When first given his nickname, Fatty doesn’t like it. But he realises he can’t change it, so he grins and gets on with becoming everyone’s friend.
Body-shaming, hate speech, stereotyping – every offence a children’s book could commit. And yet it’s also marvellously plotted and absorbing to read even today.
Give me Enid Blyton and Fatty every day of the week as opposed to the po-faced, politically correct, supreme censors of silliness who want to ruin her.
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In California, Parents May Soon Effectively Lose Custody of Kids 12 and Older
In California, “stranger danger” may be about to acquire a whole new meaning.
Forget warning kids. It’s the parents in California who will need to be terrified of strangers if a new bill passes.
Snuck into AB 665, legislation ostensibly about extending mental health care to lower-income California youths, is a provision that effectively would terminate parents’ rights over their kids as soon as they turn 12.
The California Family Council warns that this bill “would allow children as young as 12 years old to consent to being placed into state funded group homes without parental permission or knowledge.”
As long as a mental health professional signs off on it, the kids can go to such a group home—and it doesn’t matter what their parents think.
“This bill gives a stranger, a school psychologist, power to decide whether a sixth or seventh grader comes home from school that day, and that’s terrifying,” Erin Friday, a California mom of two teens, tells The Daily Signal.
“This bill is essentially stating that parents are criminals that have to prove their innocence to get their child back,” adds Friday, who is a leader of the parent advocacy group Our Duty.
Seriously?
AB 665, which passed out of the Assembly Judiciary Committee last week, builds on a 2010 measure signed into law by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican. That law, the Mental Health Services for At-Risk Youth Act, allowed California children 12 and older to receive mental health care without their parents’ knowledge if a mental health provider determined it was best not to involve the parents.
That provision was no accident. The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, celebrated the California law in a 2010 report as a “useful model for state or federal legislation to address mental illness among LGBT youth.”
“LGBT youth are likely to avoid using public mental health services if they believe that doing so will cause them to have to reveal their LGBT status to their parents or peers,” the Center for American Progress report said.
That same report also made the case that mental health services were vital for suicide prevention for LGBT youth: “Providing LGBT adolescents with access to mental health services is essential to helping them cope with the extreme pressures that have led many of them to consider suicide.”
But the data suggests that California’s Mental Health Services for At-Risk Youth Act hasn’t had the effect its boosters hoped for. In 2010, the year the legislation passed, 92 minors in California committed suicide, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Nor was 2010 an outlier: Looking at the years 2000-2010, an average of 82 minors a year committed suicide. From 2011-2020, the last year for which data is available, 106 minors a year on average committed suicide in California.
So much for the success of the 2010 law.
Yet instead of reexamining and reforming the old law—which did allow 12-year-olds to access psychological care without parental permission or knowledge, but not residential services—California legislators are now seriously considering expanding the 2010 law and allowing 12-year-olds to go to residential treatment without parental permission.
Of course, that’s an outrageous slap in the face to parental rights.
But it’s also unlikely to help the kids who are troubled and seeking treatment. Pamela Garfield-Jaeger, a licensed clinical social worker since 1999, wrote on her Substack: “In my experience, working with youth in a school setting without parental involvement was ineffective. It was when the parents gave input, shared their point of view and communicated with their teen, [that] the real healing began.”
Garfield-Jaeger, who testified against the new California bill, also warned about the dangers of placing minors in new residences.
“I worked in group homes I know what they are really like, and they are far from ideal,” the social worker said in her testimony. “Residential facilities lead kids to adopt new harmful habits, such as drug use, self-harm, and violent behavior.”
“Youth residential facilities are usually unlocked, and many kids run away into the hands of sex traffickers,” she added.
Why are California lawmakers trying to make it easier for kids to face such horrible fates?
The unspoken reason seems likely here: California lawmakers know that plenty of parents have concerns about minors who pursue gender transition. These are valid concerns: gender transition medical procedures, even for minors, can be extensive—and some of it is irreversible.
The growing “detransitioner” movement highlights how some people receive transgender treatment, and then have regrets.
“I shouldn’t have been allowed to go through this,” Chloe Cole, a detransitioner who regretted her gender transition after having breast removal surgery at 16, told “The Daily Signal Podcast” in January.
But California lawmakers don’t want parents to be able to stand in the way of their minor children making these life-changing decisions.
“It is apparent that one result of this bill will be the removal of trans-identified children from the family home,” Garfield-Jaeger said in her testimony. “In the dystopian nightmare we are in, if a parent doesn’t use the child’s chosen pronoun or name, they are labeled dangerous.”
In an interview with Fox News, Friday referred to this legislation as “state-sanctioned kidnapping.”
She’s right—and it’s terrifying that California lawmakers are considering legalizing, not penalizing, kidnapping.
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America’s Censorship Regime
Ernest Ramirez, a car-wash technician in a small, south Texas town, led a simple but fulfilling life with his son, Ernesto Junior. Junior was a “wonderful child, full of smiles.” Ramirez had raised his son alone; he’d never known his own father and sought to provide Junior with the paternal love he had missed. A talented baseball player, Junior dreamed of playing professionally. The two lived paycheck to paycheck but were happy because, as Ramirez put it, they had each other.
Then, on April 19, 2021, 16-year-old Junior—who had no previous health problems—received the first dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. Five days later, the young athlete collapsed while running. By the time the elder Ramirez arrived at the hospital, having been told he could not ride in the ambulance with his son, Junior was dead.
According to the autopsy report, the cause of Junior’s death was an “enlarged heart.” Upon receiving the news, Ramirez lost all desire to go on living. But after the initial shock subsided, Ramirez decided to travel and speak about Junior’s fate, in hopes that he could help other families avoid similar tragedies.
That plan proved more difficult than Ramirez anticipated. In September 2021, GoFundMe removed an account he had opened to raise money for a trip to the nation’s capital to share his son’s story. “The content of your fundraiser falls under our ‘Prohibited Conduct’ section,” the company’s email explained. Ramirez lost the donations he had thus far received. Two months later, Twitter took down a photograph Ramirez had posted depicting him standing beside Junior’s open casket, along with the caption “My good byes to my Baby Boy” followed by three brokenheart emojis. Even a father’s simple expression of grief was apparently forbidden by the social media platform’s government-supported censorship regime.
Around that time, Ramirez met Brianne Dressen, a 40-year-old woman who had volunteered for the AstraZeneca vaccine trials and suffered a severe adverse reaction diagnosed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as “post-vaccine neuropathy.” Her varied and acute symptoms at times required use of a wheelchair and drastically curtailed her ability to participate in her young children’s lives.
For a time after her diagnosis, Dressen fell into a severe depression. However, during the spring of 2021, she discovered online support groups for vaccine-injured individuals and their family members. Connecting to others who understood her plight greatly improved her outlook on life, and she began serving as an administrator of several of the groups.
But in July 2021, less than 24 hours after Dressen participated in a press conference with U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Facebook shut down one support group’s account. Though participants had merely discussed their often-harrowing personal experiences and shared medical treatments that they found helpful, Facebook claimed they were spreading harmful “misinformation” that warranted the group’s removal.
The cascade of shutdowns of support groups and accounts belonging to the vaccine injured on Facebook and other social media platforms continues to this day. Ramirez, Dressen, and others learned that when their accounts weren’t suspended or removed, they were shadow-banned—meaning that the platforms’ algorithms buried their posts so that they were rarely, if ever, viewable, even to like-minded individuals facing similar health problems. In Dressen’s words: “The constant threat of having our groups shut down and our connections pulled apart left me and many other members and leaders frozen, unable to communicate and connect with those who needed our help the most. We spent more time managing the chaos of the censorship algorithms that continued to evolve, than we did actually helping people through the trauma of their injuries.”
The obstacles encountered by Ramirez, Dressen, and thousands of other individuals with similar experiences and opinions were in no way coincidental or accidental. Nor were they the result of a series of errors in judgment made by low-level employees of social media platforms. Rather, they were the products of concerted efforts at the highest levels of the American government to ensure that individuals with opposing viewpoints could not be heard, contrary to the guarantees made to every American citizen in the Bill of Rights. One purpose of these unconstitutional actions to violate the rights of American citizens was political gain.
As COVID-19 inoculations became widely available to the American public, the Biden White House came to view vaccine hesitancy as a significant political problem. Beginning in spring 2021, the administration explicitly and publicly blamed social media platforms for vaccine refusal: By failing to censor “misinformation” about the vaccines, the president infamously alleged, tech companies were effectively “killing people.” The president’s incendiary accusation was accompanied by threats of regulatory or other legal action (should the companies refuse to comply) from various high-ranking members of the administration, including former White House Press Secretary Jennifer Psaki, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Psaki boasted that government officials were in regular touch with social media platforms, telling them what and in some cases even whom to censor.
Astute social media users noticed that censorship on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook escalated in tandem with the government’s threats, often yielding absurd results. For example, Twitter marked as misleading Dr. Martin Kulldorff’s April 2021 tweet stating that not everyone needed a COVID-19 vaccine, especially children and the previously infected. Dr. Kulldorff is one of the world’s most cited epidemiologists and infectious disease experts. That he was censored for speaking on the area of his expertise by someone almost certainly far less knowledgeable should concern any fair-minded person purely on the basis of preserving the openness that is required for educated scientific debate. (Last month, the World Health Organization revised its official recommendation, saying that children and teenagers may not need COVID-19 vaccines—a position deemed “misinformation” not half a year ago.)
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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