A young Canadian artist was about to have an exhibition of her paintings at a gallery in Toronto.

Visions Gallery had planned to showcase the work of Amanda PL, 29, a local non-Indigenous artist who says she was inspired by the Woodlands style made famous by the Anishinabe artist Norval Morrisseau beginning in the ’60s, with a focus on nature, animals and Indigenous spirituality.

But within hours of the gallery’s email announcement promoting the exhibit, there was a backlash, with people alleging that PL had appropriated Indigenous culture and art.

So the gallery canceled the exhibit.

Chippewa artist Jay Soule was among those leading the charge. He argues PL blatantly copied Morrisseau with virtually no regard for the storytelling behind his work.

“What she’s doing is essentially cultural genocide, because she’s taking his stories and retelling them, which bastardizes it down the road. Other people will see her work and they’ll lose the connection between the real stories that are attached to it,” said Soule.

No doubt some will, but that happens with everything. People see what they see, read what they read, listen to what they listen to. All art has sources and influences. If you try to shut down art that has influences, there will be no art left, except what people create for their own enjoyment. Since Amanda PL is explicit about what inspired her, the chances are good that she would have motivated new people to find the work of Norval Morrisseau.

PL said she first became inspired by the Woodlands style when she was living in Thunder Bay, Ont., studying to become a visual arts teacher and taking Native studies.

“I just tried to learn all I could about the Aboriginal culture, their teachings, their stories, and I’ve tried to capture the beauty of the art style and make it my own by drawing upon elements of nature within Canada that have meaning to me,” she told CBC Toronto in an interview Friday.

Which is what artists and other culture purveyors do. It’s an inherent and crucial part of cultural conversation, and it’s a good thing, not a bad one. If Amanda PL were pretending she’d invented the style that would be appropriation, but she isn’t.

Visions Gallery co-owner Tony Magee acknowledged PL didn’t misrepresent herself to him or his partner, artist Francisco Castro Lostalo, in their conversations ahead of the planned exhibit.

Magee said it never came up, and he didn’t think to ask whether she was Indigenous. “In retrospect, I wish that I had,” he said in a phone interview Friday.

It was only after the exhibit was announced on Monday that he learned PL was not Indigenous.

Ok what are the rules here? If PL is not allowed to incorporate indigenous styles in her painting, does that mean that Indigenous painters are not allowed to incorporate European styles in theirs?

If artists aren’t allowed to incorporate styles of artists of the Wrong Race, that means they should avoid looking at art by people of the Wrong Race, doesn’t it? Maybe that means they should be forcibly prevented from looking at it, just to be safe? No Rembrandt or Vermeer or Velasquez for you First Nations peeps; no Frida Kahlo for you gringos; NO MIXING for anyone.

You can see some of her work here.

The Lake

Make America great again: make sure our precious children have access to all the sugar and fat they want. That’ll show that uppity Michelle Obama for trying to make school food healthy.

The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 centered on cleaning up school food. Getting the act passed became a key focus of Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign to fight childhood obesity.

Now, the new USDA Chief, Sonny Perdue, is expected to put forward a new rule on Monday that will give schools “more flexibility in meeting federal nutrition standards for school lunches,” according to a new report in The Hill.

The law required the federal government to use recommendations from the Institute of Medicine to make the National School Lunch Program more nutritious, with more whole grains, a wider variety of fruits and vegetables, and less sodium and meat.

Well we can’t have that. This is America. Eating more fruits and vegetables is for those faggoty Europeans. Pass me the fried chicken.

Justin Rosario at the Daily Banter is struck by the sheer spite:

On Monday, former Republican governor Sonny Perdue was confirmed to be Secretary of Agriculture. By Friday, he had already announced he would be gutting Michelle Obama’s work in fighting childhood obesity:

On Friday, the department announced its secretary, former Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue, will introduce an interim rule to provide “regulatory flexibility” for the National School Lunch Program at a Virginia elementary school on Monday, alongside Pat Roberts, R-Kansas, chair of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry.

“Regulatory flexibility” translates into “ignoring regulations we don’t like.” Ostensibly, this is about the “cost” of the program. In reality, this is just the latest attempt to erase the Obamas from the history books with the added bonus of hurting America’s children. Because if you’re going to be a sociopath, why not go all the way?

…

People whose job it is to care about the well-being of other humans are baffled by the seemingly pointless move:

American Heart Association CEO Nancy Brown said much progress had been made and 99 percent of schools were complying with the program.”

Improving children’s health should be a top priority for the USDA, and serving more nutritious foods in schools is a clear-cut way to accomplish this goal,” Brown said. “Rather than altering the current path forward, we hope the agency focuses more on providing technical assistance that can help schools get across the finish line, if they haven’t done so already.”

Sadly, the top priority for every Republican has nothing to improving anything; it’s all about reversing the progress made and doing so out of sheer spite. It’s hard to wrap your head around it: What kind of person would deliberately make children less healthy just to get back at someone who did nothing but work to improve the live of America’s youth?

The kind who are with Donald Trump.

Via Helen Dale on Twitter:

News from Jordan:

A law which protected Jordan’s rapists from punishment if they married their victims looks set to be scrapped.

The Jordanian cabinet revoked Article 308 on Sunday, after years of campaigning by women’s activists, as well as Muslim and Christian scholars and others.

The law had meant rapists could avoid a jail term in return for marrying their victim for at least three years.

Its supporters said the law protected a victim’s honour and reputation.

The victim’s “honour and reputation” shouldn’t be at issue anyway. It’s ridiculous. Imagine thinking someone whose wallet is stolen suffers damage to her honour and reputation.

And the rapist, blindingly obviously, should not escape punishment by further victimizing the victim. Imagine a guy beats up a woman, concussing her and breaking some ribs. Now imagine he gets to escape punishment if he marries her. The problem is obvious: oh gee, he beat her up once, what’s to stop him doing it again?

I suppose the logic is that then they would be married so then the forced sex would not be rape, it would just be sex. They’re married – married women don’t get to refuse sex with their husbands.

Heads men win, tails women lose.

Noor – not her real name – was just 20 when she was raped by a 55-year-old man.

He was her boss when one day, she complained of a headache. After taking the two pills he offered her, she lost consciousness.

“I couldn’t remember what happened next; I wake up and find myself naked and raped,” she told women’s rights campaign group Equality Now.

“I couldn’t tell my family what had happened. I cried and cried not knowing what to do. At that moment, I realised that my family will be devastated.”

It was only after Noor discovered she was pregnant, that she found the courage to report the rape – but then her attacker offered to marry her under Article 308.

Noor was given no choice in the matter.

“With all the hatred I have in my heart, my family forced me to marry him so as to save the ‘family’s honour’,” she said.

Nice “family.”

Originally a comment by iknklast on Eliminate the safety regulations.

I wonder how the “let’s get rid of safety regulations” policy is going to go over with Trump’s presumed blue-collar, working man base

Most of the blue-collar workers that surround me are ecstatic about the idea. They have bought into the idea that these regulations are unnecessary, are telling them how to do their job, are keeping them from making better money…in short, they voted for Trump because of this sort of thing, not in spite of it. At a recent meeting of a group that benefits highly from OSHA regulations, they were all discussing how eager they were for OSHA regulations to go away.

I think the problem is that most people working today don’t remember how it used to be. They assume the workplace would still be as clean and safe without the regulations, because they have been told that all the regulations do is mean that they can’t move this box without two people—oh, goodness, you mean I can’t lift a 100 pound box without help? How dare they! And they believe that the big benefactor of these regulations is the government, not the working man.

Now, once the regulations actually go away, they may find out the truth…by then, it will be too late. It took a long time and a lot of hard work, and dead people, to get the rules put in place to begin with. It may be even more difficult to get them back. (And it may not…people who have known what life is like with the rules may rise up very quickly and very firmly once they lose them…we can hope that is the scenario, that they throw the bums out).

Poor Fox. They just can’t get it right.

Jesse Watters, the Fox News host who took heat this week for making a joke about Ivanka Trump that was criticized as lewd, said on Wednesday that he would be taking a family vacation until Monday. The move came just three days after his show began airing in a new high-profile time slot.

Mr. Watters, who denied that his comment about President Trump’s daughter was sexual, announced his upcoming absence near the end of Wednesday night’s edition of “The Five.” He will miss two days of the show’s first week in prime time after it took over the 9 p.m. slot from “The O’Reilly Factor,” and he will miss his “Watters’ World” show on Saturday.

So he messed up on his second day. That’s gotta hurt.

Mr. Watters’s highly scrutinized joke came during Tuesday’s show as the hosts discussed footage of Ms. Trump being jeered onstage in Berlin while she was speaking on a panel about female entrepreneurship.

“It’s funny, the left says they really respect women, and then when given an opportunity to respect a woman like that, they boo and hiss,” he said.

Oh yeah, the zany left doesn’t admire Sarah Palin, either. That’s because respecting women as a class is about thinking women are people; it’s not about thinking all women are perfect. I think that’s a pretty clear distinction.

Then he added with a grin: “So I don’t really get what’s going on here, but I really liked how she was speaking into that microphone.”

On Wednesday, after the clip had been shared widely on social media, Mr. Watters said in a statement that the comment had not been sexual innuendo, as critics perceived it to be.

Because Fox just isn’t like that, right?

Moses bites the bullet.

You can support J and M on Patreon.

Our dear ally Saudi Arabia –

A  man in Saudi Arabia has reportedly been sentenced to death on charges of apostasy after losing two appeals.

Several local media reports identified the man as Ahmad Al Shamri, in his 20s, from the town of Hafar al-Batin, who first came to the authorities’ attention in 2014 after allegedly uploading videos to social media in which he renounced Islam and the Prophet Mohammed.

He was arrested on charges of atheism and blasphemy and held in prison before being convicted by a local court and sentenced to death in February 2015.

The Saudi state plans to kill a man for not believing in a god and for rejecting Islam.

Under Saudi Arabia’s strict religious laws, leaving Islam can be punishable by harsh prison sentences and corporeal punishment – and a 2014 string of royal decrees under the late King Abdullah re-defined atheists as terrorists, according to a report by Human Rights Watch.

Last year, a citizen was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 2,000 lashes for expressing atheistic sentiment in hundreds of social media posts.

This is our ally, keep in mind. Brave hater of Mooslims Donald Trump hasn’t uttered a peep about Saudi Arabia.

International human rights watchdogs have consistently condemned Saudi Arabia’s human rights record.

The Kingdom came under further scrutiny last week when it emerged it had been elected to the UN’s women’s rights commission.

Under the country’s system of guardianship, women’s rights and freedom of movement is heavily restricted. They are not allowed to drive, and voted for the first time in 2015.

“Electing Saudi Arabia to protect women’s rights is like making an arsonist into the town fire chief,” UN Watch Director Hillel Neuer said. “It’s absurd.”

Saudi Arabia has sat on the UN’s human rights council since September 2015.

That too is ridiculous. Saudi Arabia has contempt for human rights.

Maajid Nawaz tweets:

Imagine if one of our allies sentenced a man to death *just for being a Muslim*. Atheists are among the most persecuted minorities globally https://t.co/06lEOu3yhc

— Maajid (@MaajidNawaz) April 26, 2017

Well, this isn’t what I was hoping to see. Obama has agreed to do a talk at a health care conference sponsored by a Wall Street investment bank for the modest sum of Four Hundred Thousand Dollars.

Out of office for about three months, Mr. Obama has begun the process of cashing in. In February, he and his wife, Michelle, each signed book deals worth tens of millions of dollars. And Mr. Obama’s spokesman confirmed last week that he is beginning the paid-speech circuit.

A $400,000 speaking fee for addressing the Cantor Fitzgerald conference is a sharp increase from the amounts typically paid to his predecessors. Former President Bill Clinton averaged about $200,000 per speech while former President George W. Bush is reportedly paid $100,000 to $175,000 for each appearance.

I suppose nobody much wants to listen to Bush do a talk, even Republicans.

Aaron Blake at the Post has thoughts on why Obama shouldn’t be chasing the bucks the way the Clintons did.

For one thing, it continues a bad precedent.

George W. Bush and Bill Clinton did this, too, as have Hillary Clinton, Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan. And the more that Wall Street firms give out-of-office presidents and big-name politicians these paydays, the more they become the norm. Other presidents will know that such payments are on the table, and it risks coloring their decisions with regard to Wall Street and special interests.

Which is already happening with Obama, retroactively. Liberals loved (and miss) his presidency, but if there’s one thing the Elizabeth Warren/Bernie Sanders wing is still sore about in the Obama administration, it’s the lack of prosecutions for anybody involved in the financial crisis. In September, Warren, a senator from Massachusetts, requested a formal investigation of why no charges were brought.

And now they’re paying him? Appearances, dude.

Also, this shouldn’t be why people go into government. The more people do it, the more it gets normalized. How’s that working out for us so far?

Blake quotes that bit from The Audacity of Hope that I blogged about recently.

I can’t assume that the money chase didn’t alter me in some ways. …

Increasingly I found myself spending time with people of means — law firm partners and investment bankers, hedge fund managers and venture capitalists. As a rule, they were smart, interesting people, knowledgeable about public policy, liberal in their politics, expecting nothing more than a hearing of their opinions in exchange for their checks. But they reflected, almost uniformly, the perspectives of their class: the top 1 percent or so of the income scale that can afford to write a $2,000 check to a political candidate. …

And although my own worldview and theirs corresponded in many ways — I had gone to the same schools, after all, had read the same books, and worried about my kids in many of the same ways — I found myself avoiding certain topics during conversations with them, papering over possible differences, anticipating their expectations. On core issues I was candid; I had no problem telling well-heeled supporters that the tax cuts they’d received from George Bush should be reversed. Whenever I could, I would try to share with them some of the perspectives I was hearing from other portions of the electorate: the legitimate role of faith in politics, say, or the deep cultural meaning of guns in rural parts of the state.

Still, I know that as a consequence of my fundraising I became more like the wealthy donors I met, in the very particular sense that I spent more and more of my time above the fray, outside the world of immediate hunger, disappointment, fear, irrationality, and frequent hardship of the other 99 percent of the population — that is, the people that I’d entered public life to serve.

And yet here we are.

Word is the deal for the two books the two Obamas will write was $65 million. You’d think they could skip the chats to bankers.