"The community feels that this art was given to us, for free, and it's now been taken away to be sold for huge profit. I'm very angry about the Banksy going - we want our Banksy back!"

"The street art was stencilled onto the side of a Poundland shop in Wood Green in 2012 but disappeared last week." The chunk of wall has now been removed and is up for auction where it's expected to sell for over half a million dollars.

Poundland say they are not behind the removal of the artwork, which was behind a protective perspex screen when it was taken. A spokesman said: 'We're not responsible for either selling or removing the Banksy mural. We're currently investigating.'

A Met Police spokesman said the removal has not been reported as a crime.

There's a legal and a moral issue here. I assume that it was a crime to put the art on the wall and that whoever owns the wall owns the graffiti and can sell it. If these works are worth so much money and it was my wall, I'd want to have it removed before somebody stole it or damaged it. You'd think other graffiti artists would be tempted to paint over it.

But if removing these things is frowned upon by the very people who love it and imbue it with value, then it's not worth so much. I could picture the artist seeing this kind of wrangling over the commerce and preservation to be part of the artwork and part of the publicity game around the artwork. No one item is of real value to him. It's about giving things away, and the artwork itself depicts a child engaged in slave labor. It's all about the art. The people's emotional attachment to it and their despair as they lose it are all part of the art.

Or so I presume. Sorry, I haven't really been following the Banksy thing. It's the sort of thing I would normally be interested in, but somehow I've averted my eyes from this character. Here's his Wikipedia page if you need to catch up on him or correct me on my mispresumptions.

In 1885, responding to Khama III, Bathoen, and Sebele, the British took over in "Bechuanaland."

The southern part of that place became part of South Africa, but the northern part went on to become what today is Botswana, today's "History of" country, an independent constitutional democracy since 1964.

Politicians and their wives... chez Drudge.

Right now, at Drudge, at the top of the middle and left columns:



The message of the juxtaposition seems to be: Powerful political wives dominate their husbands. Or: Bow down to women, O ye men!

Here's the story about Carla and Nicolas moving to — of all places to avoid taxes — the UK. You know taxes are harsh when England seems like the way out. (Didn't the English rock stars use to move to France to avoid taxes? (Back in the days when The Beatles contributed to the protest-song genre with "Taxman.")

[Nicolas Sarkozy] and his former supermodel third wife Carla Bruni-Sarkozy would be likely to settle in an affluent district like South Kensington – so becoming the most high profile Gallic celebrity couple in the city.

But the former president is under investigation for corruption in France, and if he does cross the Channel there will be outrage.

Oh, to be relatively young and super high profile! Carla is waving bye-bye. We'll see what her getaway looks like. (How "Gallic" is Carla Bruni? She was born Carla Gilberta Bruni Tedeschi, in Turin, Italy. How coupled is she? She famously cheated on Eric Clapton with Mick Jagger.)

Meanwhile, in America, I've got no criticism of Barack Obama bowing to his wife as he invites her to dance. Or do you think anytime he bows, he calls up the old bowing-to-dictators meme?

A cartoon from 1233.

I'm fascinated by the school lesson material at the U.K. National Archive site. That cartoon is from one titled "A Medieval Mystery" that asks students to "decode the dark secrets of this cartoon" and offers tips on things to look for (e.g., devils) and prompts with questions like "How has the cartoonist shown that the man and the woman are Jewish?"

"By 1666 at least 12,000 white smallholders had been bought out, died," or left Barbados.

"Many of the remaining whites were increasingly poor. By 1680 there were seventeen slaves for every indentured servant. By 1700, there were 15,000 free whites and 50,000 enslaved blacks."

... The British abolished the slave trade in 1807, but not the institution itself. In 1816, slaves rose up in the largest major slave rebellion in the island's history. Twenty thousand slaves from over seventy plantations rebelled. They drove whites off the plantations, but widespread killings did not take place. This was later termed "Bussa's Rebellion" after the slave ranger, Bussa, who with his assistants hated slavery, found the treatment of slaves on Barbados to be "intolerable," and believed the political climate in the UK made the time ripe to peacefully negotiate with planters for freedom... Bussa's Rebellion failed. One hundred and twenty slaves died in combat or were immediately executed; another 144 were brought to trial and executed; remaining rebels were shipped off the island...

Slavery was abolished in 1834 in Barbados, today's "History of" country.

ADDED: Here— at the U.K. National Archives website — is a school lesson on Bussa's rebellion, with nice scannings of original documents for students to read. And here's a drawing taken from the rebels that "appears to stress the rebels' loyalty to Britain and to the Crown while conveying their earnest desire for liberty."

Drudge revolts against the British.

Yes, of course, the British don't like our guns.



They're still licking their wounds from the 18th century.

Danny Boyle has declined a knighthood.

He's about being "an equal citizen," he says.

Who else has declined a knighthood? Among others:

David Bowie, musician
Francis Crick, physicist and Nobel Prize winner
Michael Faraday, scientist
Albert Finney, actor
E. M. Forster, author and essayist
Michael Frayn, novelist and dramatist
John Galsworthy, playwright and novelist
Graham Greene, novelist
Stephen Hawking, scientist
David Hockney, CH, RA, artist
Aldous Huxley, author
Rudyard Kipling, author
Henry Moore, sculptor
J.B. Priestley, novelist and playwright
George Bernard Shaw, playwright and critic
Paul Scofield, actor
Ralph Vaughan Williams composer
H.G. Wells, writer

Meanwhile, also at the link: Winston Churchill declined a Dukedom, Neville Chamberlain declined an earldom, John Cleese declined a barony, and John Lennon returned his MBE "in protest against Britain's involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing, against our support of America in Vietnam, and against Cold Turkey slipping down the charts."

The United States is constitutionally forbidden to grant titles of nobility. How different would we be now if we'd been doing that sort of thing all these years?

Dignities and high sounding names have different effects on different beholders. The lustre of the Star and the title of My Lord, over-awe the superstitious vulgar, and forbid them to inquire into the character of the possessor: Nay more, they are, as it were, bewitched to admire in the great, the vices they would honestly condemn in themselves. This sacrifice of common sense is the certain badge which distinguishes slavery from freedom; for when men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.

Said Thomas Paine.

Life in London — the random act of violence.

"The Daily Mail called the assailant the 'most brutal thug in Britain,' which maybe says as much about the United Kingdom’s relatively safety as it does about the brutality of this attacker."

So... the shockingness of the video demonstrates how safe they really are?

"A teenager arrested on Remembrance Sunday on suspicion of posting a picture of a burning poppy on Facebook is being questioned by police."

"The 19-year-old was held after the image of a poppy being set ablaze by a lighter was reportedly posted online with the caption: 'How about that you squadey cunts.'"

"Wind farms have been 'peppered' across Britain without enough consideration for the countryside and people’s homes..."

"... a senior Conservative energy minister admitted last night as he warned 'enough is enough.'"

John Hayes said that we can “no longer have wind turbines imposed on communities” and added that it “seems extraordinary” they have allowed to spread so much throughout the country.

The energy minister said he had ordered a new analysis of the case for onshore wind power which would form the basis of future government policy, rather than “a bourgeois Left article of faith based on some academic perspective.”...

“We can no longer have wind turbines imposed on communities. I can’t single-handedly build a new Jerusalem but I can protect our green and pleasant land.”

That last sentence is a reference to the poem by William Blake.

The poem was inspired by the apocryphal story that a young Jesus, accompanied by his uncle Joseph of Arimathea, a tin merchant, travelled to what is now England and visited Glastonbury during Jesus' lost years. The legend is linked to an idea in the Book of Revelation.... describing a Second Coming, wherein Jesus establishes a new Jerusalem. The Christian Church in general, and the English Church in particular, used Jerusalem as a metaphor for Heaven, a place of universal love and peace.

Are there wind turbines in Heaven?

"After Warnings of an Olympic Crush, Businesses Suffer in a Deserted London."

Regular tourists, who would have patronized the shops and theaters and so forth, chose to go somewhere else.

Cabdrivers complain that business is down 30 percent from normal at this time of year. “Where are the million extra visitors that we were promised?” asked Steve McNamara, a spokesman for the Licensed Taxi Drivers’ Association. He coupled this with a palpable absence of the national pride Mr. Cameron has urged on a nation hosting its first Olympics since 1948. “I’m looking forward to the closing ceremony,” on Aug. 12, Mr. McNamara said.

"Look, if you colonists have been successful, you didn't get there on your own. You didn't get there on your own."

I didn't write this on my own. In fact, I didn't write it at all. Meade wrote this:

Lord North: Look, if you colonists have been successful, you didn't get there on your own. You didn't get there on your own. I'm always struck by colonists and yeomen who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart.

George Washington: Without our consent, we reject your taxes.

Lord North: There are a lot of smart people out there in the New World. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking British subjects of the Crown out there.

Thomas Jefferson: Stop coercing us, Lord North. Your Acts are intolerable.

Lord North: If you yankees were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great King somewhere in your life. Some members of Parliament helped to create this unbelievable Royal Navy system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in French and Indian Wars and the East India Company.



Alexander Hamilton: The King is your king. He is only our king by our agreement.

Lord North: If you've got a medical practice or silver smithery or a cabinetmaking business -- you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. The printing press didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the printing press so that all the pamphleteers could make money off the printing press.

Sam Adams: Hey, Lord North, shove your Stamp Act where the sun don't set.

Lord North: All right, all right - everybody just calm down. In politics, we all tolerate a certain amount of spin. I understand these are the games that get played in political campaigns. Although when folks just, like, omit entire sentences of what you said, they start kind of splicing and dicing, you may have gone a little over the edge there, you pesky Americans.

"As London prepares to throw the world a $14 billion party, it seems fair to ask the question..."

"What does it get out of the bargain aside from some shiny medals, pleasant memories, and an excess of David Beckham bobblehead dolls?"

"Romney book: Britain is a tiny island that makes stuff nobody wants."

That's the headline in Foreign Policy, which is getting attention (according to Memeorandum), especially after Romney supposedly said something that upset the Brits today. (Surveying the London Olympics, Romney saw "a few things that were disconcerting." The Brits are keen to mock, and the mockery is magnified here in the U.S., because American media is inclined to boost Obama whenever the opportunity arises.)

Let's look at the paragraph Foreign Policy highlighted:

England [sic/[FP's sic]] is just a small island. Its roads and houses are small. With few exceptions, it doesn't make things that people in the rest of the world want to buy. And if it hadn't been separated from the continent by water, it almost certainly would have been lost to Hitler's ambitions. Yet only two lifetimes ago, Britain ruled the largest and wealthiest empire in the history of humankind. Britain controlled a quarter of the earth's land and a quarter of the earth's population.

Oh, there's where they cut it off? Well, obviously he was in the middle of making a point. But you know the rule in journalism: Taking things out of context is okay when you do it to hurt conservatives. But I happen to have my Kindle copy of Romney's book "No Apology: Believe in America," so it's easy for me to give you the context. Here are the next 4 paragraphs:

Late in the eighteenth century, after the loss of their American colonies...

Foreign Policy didn't want to remind us Americans that Britain antagonized us.

... the British set out to compensate for what had been lost, first by defeating Napoleonic France and then by expanding the reach of the crown in colonies from India to the tip of South America and from Africa to the islands of the Western Pacific. 

And all that imperialism by the British doesn't make them look too appealing.

Britain’s might was military, having built the most powerful navy the world had ever seen. But what enabled their military superiority was their industrial might. The British had pioneered the Industrial Revolution, and they enthusiastically promoted free trade, understanding the huge export potential for their products. By 1860, the nation’s economy was the biggest in the world. 

Here's the great compliment to the British, but you know there's a big but...

But maintaining leadership proved more difficult than achieving it. Whereas other nations extended the manufacturing revolution by embracing new technology and innovation, the British reversed course and tried to contain it. The country’s culture of class immobility stymied the entrepreneurialism and initiative that propel a competitive economy. 

Here's the serious critique.

From owner to laborer, the British were eager to protect the status quo. Industrialists secured subsidies for themselves and tariffs on foreigners rather than face foreign competition and technology head-on. When subsidies proved insufficient for the most unproductive businesses, the government took them over. The nation spent national resources to keep sick companies alive rather than inventing new ones and investing in those that were strong.

Britain’s economic missteps were compounded when it was forced to fight and endure the cost of two world wars. By the end of World War II, its national debt had tripled. Massive loans were required to shore up the ailing economy; they came from its former colony.

Now Foreign Policy — a respected journal? — ends its out of context squib with snark: "Its roads and houses are small? The trees probably aren't the right height either." I'm giving you the whole context that Foreign Policy didn't want to deal with. It's about the British decline into socialism. What do you say we take that seriously?

Socialism/capitalism — that's how campaign 2012 has been framed. Let's stare that issue in the face. Sorry if the Brits' feelings are hurt, but this is about us.

Drudge is back to color with a glowing image of Romney...

... who has — supposedly — "made his decision!" for VP.



Also on the page right now: Column 1: A very skinny-looking Obama with his fists balled up as though he's going to bang on the lectern. The linked story is: "Obama Goes Wild: 'If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen.'" Column 2: Traffic on a road with the sign reading "Avoid London/Area closed," above a link reading "CHAOS: 32-mile backup in London as VIP Games lanes open...." (By the way, don't these London Olympics chaos stories help Romney, the man who saved the Salt Lake City Olympics?) Column 3: A dramatic and somber closeup of Hillary Clinton, above links about Egyptians throwing things at her motorcade. Below the fold in Column 2 is a holdover from Drudge's B&W period: The comedian George Lopez and a link to his routine with the line "Romney Is F***ing Latino, He Won't Admit It..."

"What else an one expect from a Republican magazine, they probably dislike themselves."

Outrage over photoshopping Kate Middleton's teeth for a magazine cover about how something's "rotten" in Great Britain. But the magazine is The New Republic... not the New Republican.

"As an ideologically based movement, socialism is no longer vital."

"Today it’s a combination of democracy, rule of law and the welfare state, and I’d say a vast majority of Europeans defend this — the British Tories can’t touch the National Health Service without being beheaded."

"If we accept the Liverpool Care Pathway we accept that euthanasia is part of the standard way of dying..."

"... as it is now associated with 29 per cent of NHS deaths."

The theme of the opening ceremony for the London Olympics is "green and pleasant."

We will see a representation of "the mythical British countryside: meadows, maypoles, picnicking families, toiling farmers, cricketers on the village green. There will be twelve horses and three sheepdogs. There will be Elgar, and the world’s largest harmonized bell, inscribed with the line 'Be not afeard, the isle is full of noises,' from 'The Tempest.'"

It will be — by design — quite the contrast to the big show they did in Beijing back in 2003.  It will be "a bit warmer, and more inclusive, and more involving."

What do you think of the "green and pleasant" approach?
	Lame! Step it up, Britain. Outdo China. Don't abase yourself.
	Lovely! The truest and best answer to loudness is quiet.
	Let the English be English, and if that's what it is, so be it.
pollcode.com free polls

"The government will be able to monitor the calls, emails, texts and website visits of everyone..."

"... in the UK under new legislation set to be announced soon. Internet firms will be required to give intelligence agency GCHQ access to communications on demand, in real time."

But Conservative MP and former shadow home secretary David Davis said... "What this is talking about doing is not focusing on terrorists or criminals, it's absolutely everybody's emails, phone calls, web access...

"All that's got to be recorded for two years and the government will be able to get at it with no by or leave from anybody."