Trigger warnings for P. G. Wodehouse.

It’s come to this, but has a lot further to go.

From The Times.

PG Wodehouse is the latest author to have their [sic] work altered after a publishing house edited several Jeeves and Wooster books as part of an effort to remove “unacceptable” prose.

The novels Right Ho, Jeeves and Thank You, Jeeves, both released in 1934, have had passages reworked or removed in new editions published by Penguin Random House to strip them of language that modern audiences might find offensive.

What’s worse, people are actually paid for this Bowdlerizing.

Penguin employs sensitivity readers to vet both new publications and older works for potentially offensive language and descriptions.

Worst of all:

The rebooting of cherished fictional characters of the past has become a profitable industry for publishers, authors and estates in recent years.

So there’s little incentive for publishers’s wrecking crews to merrily continue their sanitizing literary classics to appease the woke brigades, who wouldn’t be caught dead reading them to begin with. What will they come after next? Cookbooks? Dictionaries?

Joe sticks one of his left feet in his mouth again.

You get inured to it after a while–sort of.

It seemed harmless enough, people laughed, but embarrassing just the same. The senile leader of the free world confused the name of the New Zealand rugby team, the All Blacks, with the military force created by the British Government’s Royal Irish Constabulary in 1920, during the Irish Civil War. They had a brutal reputation.

The Black and Tans gained a reputation for brutality and became notorious for reprisal attacks on civilians and civilian property, including extrajudicial killings, arson and looting. Their actions further swayed Irish public opinion against British rule and drew condemnation in Britain.

Wikipedia.

When people laugh at the President of the United States, it should be because he made a humorous remark, not a blundering error of the kind Biden makes daily. While the laughing by the Irish audience at Biden’s gaffe was friendly, it still exposes the fact he is not playing with a full deck, with not only the jokers missing but also most of the face cards too.

And note this from the Guardian, a little bit of historical revision:

The White House has corrected a gaffe by Joe Biden that confused New Zealand’s All Blacks rugby team with the British military force known as the Black and Tans that terrorised Ireland.

Are the President’s handlers aware the damage to America’s image caused by sending this idiot abroad? Earlier I would not have thought so but the fact they are still doing so suggests they just don’t care or worse.

Thanks to WJT.

Update: Biden to Irish, “Let’s go lick the world.”

No longer hiding it.

From here.

Why bother?

The progressives have progressed so far in their usurpation of the Federal Government these past few years there is no need anymore for them to even superficially pretend even handedness in their one-sided administration of “justice.” Nowadays, when a humanoid such as the one described below commits an unspeakable act, the only penalty it will have to face is three years probation, no jail time.

A mentally ill man pretending to be a woman, “smashed doors, destroyed a statue of the Virgin Mary, assaulted a church staffer, and sprayed graffiti at a Catholic church in Washington state.”

More:

According to the police report, Nota threw quite a tantrum: “She [sic] was crying hysterically, yelling obscenities, & refused to identify herself. At one point, when in the seated position, Nota threw herself to the ground & began rolling down the small grass hill… According to witness, Nota shouted, ‘According to the police report, Nota threw quite a tantrum: “She was crying hysterically, yelling obscenities, & refused to identify herself. At one point, when in the seated position, Nota threw herself to the ground & began rolling down the small grass hill… According to witness, Nota shouted, ‘Fk you! Fk the church! The church is grooming kids!’ Among the graffiti per police: ‘women haters’ ‘rot in your fake hell’ ‘abusers’ ‘kid f***ers’ ‘we hate women’ ‘kid groomers’ ‘we hate gay people.’”Fk the church! The church is grooming kids!’

More:

[S]he “smashed two glass doors with rocks,” and “police said he used a backpack full of spray paint cans to smash the police vehicle before turning himself in . . . A church staff member was spray-painted across their face while attempting to chase Nota away.”

It’s a much used rhetorical device, the “what if” argument, but that doesn’t lessen its efficacy: What if a real male, a white Republican, had committed similar crimes in a mosque and behaved in the same manner when busted by the police? Would a judge in the Biden Justice Department have sentenced him to three years probation, no jail time?

Brace yourselves, it’s only going to get worse.The next two years (at least) are going to be rough sledding indeed for decent folk in this country.

The emergence of a secret police.

A corrupt and out of control federal agency.

Your Tatler happened to watch a superb performance from 2018 of Puccini’s Tosca last night, via the Metropolitan Opera’s Met on Demand. In the first act, the villainous Roman chief of police Baron Scarpio has no qualms staking out the escaped prisoner Angelotti and his accomplice-in-hiding, the hero-painter Cavaradossi, in a chapel devoted to the Madonna in a church in Rome (the real-life Basilica di Sant’Andrea della Val, behavior some might regard as profane at the least and bordering on blasphemous.

I was reminded of that scene reading the report above from the House Judiciary Committee concerning FBI agents, similarly having no qualms, planting themselves in Catholic churches, their purpose being, as laid out in in an internal document in heavy bureacratese titled:

Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical-Traditionalist Catholic Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities.

In English, what are the “new mitigation possibilities?” That would be the targeting of traditional Catholics who engage in such dissident activities as attending or participating in the Traditional Latin Mass. They are designated by the FBI, as reported by House Judiciary Committee, “RTCs,” Radical Traditional Catholics,” whom they claim are:

typically categorized by the rejection of the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) as a valid church council; disdain for most of the popes elected since Vatican II, particularly Pope Francis and Pope John Paul II; and frequent adherence to anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ, and white supremacist ideology. Radical-traditionalist Catholics compose a small minority of overall Roman Catholic adherents and are separate and distinct from ‘traditionalist Catholics’ who prefer the Traditional Latin Mass and pre-Vatican II teachings and traditions, without the more extremist ideological beliefs and violent rhetoric.

Laying aside for the nonce the Bureau’s having no damn business investigating differences within the Catholic Church, it also does not delineate “good” TLM-ers from “bad” ones, but it is a certainty the bad ones to which they refer are members of the SSPX, the Society of St Pious X, a breakaway traditionalist organisation whose sacraments are nonetheless recognized by the Holy See.

It is no secret traditional Catholics are conservative, by definition of the word. What the FBI and the Biden administration, which no doubt is behind these investigations, find offensive is Catholics simply exercising their First Amendment rights of speech and religion, even if others find them distasteful or objectionable. The Bureau has abandoned its original charter, in which its principles are enumerated, in part, thus:

(1) conduct investigations consistent with the constitutional and legal rights of U.S. citizens; (2) conduct such investigations and collect such intelligence as is necessary for the security of the United States; (3) not conduct an investigation solely on the basis of the lawful exercise of constitutional or statutory rights, including the expression of a religious or political view or the right to peacefully assemble and petition the Government [emphasis added]; (4) conduct investigations with only such intrusion as is necessary for authorized purposes.

The FBI has morphed into a tool of the far left to persecute dissenters from their progressive, “social justice” agenda. It is far beyond reform and must be abolished. If it is replaced, which I am not sure is necessary, it should be by a vastly smaller organization, strictly limited by the terms of the original FBI charter.

Gary Cooper: “The best thing I ever did”

A familiar tale.

Another convert, this one far more illustrious than your Tatler, but his tale of conversion as told in this marvelous account, bears similarity to mine. In fact, all the conversion stories I’ve read, from Newman’s on down, have a common theme. Whether the convert-to-be was deeply religious, but of a different faith, or an irreligious gadabout like Gary Cooper or worse, at some point, they sensed an emptiness in their lives that seemed unfillable until they became acquainted with the teachings and history of the Holy Catholic Church.

That emptiness, as was revealed to Cooper and all other converts, can only be filled by the Holy Ghost in the person of Jesus Christ, and He is accessible fully only through the Catholic Church. Once the emptiness is filled, one’s life is forever changed. From there on, no matter how difficult life seemed before, it becomes somehow bearable. As Cooper said with elegant simplicity, and he speaks for me as well, it’s “the best thing I ever did.”

The quote below from Newman puts it nicely.

God knows what is my greatest happiness, but I do not. There is no rule about what is happy and good; what suits one would not suit another. And the ways by which perfection is reached vary very much; the medicines necessary for our souls are very different from each other. Thus God leads us by strange ways; we know He wills our happiness, but we neither know what our happiness is, nor the way. We are blind; left to ourselves we should take the wrong way; we must leave it to Him.

St John Henry Newman: Everyday Meditations.

Thanks to GWR.