Found Art: Is This Where it Ends? (featuring Hide and Seek by Imogen Heap)

Found Art: Is This Where it Ends? - Photography - Artist Unknown

(Click on image to enlarge)

Musical Accompaniment:

See also: Found Art: The Fourth Corner (featuring The End's Not Near by The New Year)

Statutory rape is rape -- In every single case

With the death of David Bowie the depressingly long road that lies ahead in the battle to end the narratives that enable rape culture are becoming abundantly clear.

Largely lost among the general mainstream celebration of Bowie's considerable accomplishments as an artist and his impact on popular culture are a small group of writers who have wanted to remind people of Bowie's sexual actions towards and involving young teenagers -- actions that are both legally and morally rape.

They have done so in pieces like David Bowie and believing children., David Bowie was a musical genius. He was also involved in child sexual exploitation. and Remembering Bowie: The Man, The Legend, The Sexual Abuser among others.

What has been shocking and distressing is the countless comments one encounters in response to these articles -- even from men and women who self-describe as progressive or feminist -- saying any number of variations of "they were groupies and they consented to the sex so it was not rape" or "it was the 70's" or "it was a different context", etc.

In the specific case of David Bowie, as a blogger put it in the piece David Bowie: Musical Genius, Gender-Bending Icon, Alleged Perpetrator of Sexual Violence:

He also is said to have had sex with (read: raped) girls young enough to be in junior high school, and at least one rape allegation against him. He is, like so many of your faves, problematic. It is not uncommon or unheard of for older men with fame and power to use that to exploit young girls hungry for love and acceptance. It’s also not uncommon for people to sweep this reality under the rug because they don’t want to admit that someone they admire is capable of doing these things 

But David Bowie did this, if Lori Maddox is to believed (and i choose to believe her). He “took Lori Maddox’s virginity” — as she puts it— when she was just 14 years old (I have also heard this number be 13 or 15. Either way, nothing changes). Regardless of how she views the encounter (and, to her, it was consensual and she remembers it fondly), the fact of the matter is that legally and emotionally, a 14-year-old girl cannot consent to an adult man, particularly an adult man with rock star status who provides alcohol and drugs. That same night, according to Maddox, he had a threesome with 14-year-old Maddox and 15-year-old Sable Starr. No matter how you spin it — and I want to be clear that these women are entitled to their own personal narratives — even if they could not and did not know better, he should have. Regardless of what the details of the story are, statutory rape is illegal and it was illegal in 1970, too.

This is the critical point that bears repeating: "the fact of the matter is that legally and emotionally, a 14-year-old girl cannot consent to an adult man, particularly an adult man with rock star status who provides alcohol and drugs."

And this is true irrespective of the "context", the decade and, as she makes clear, whether the young people in question "consented".

In the powerful and moving piece The Myth of the Teenage Temptress: Or Why A Young Girl Can Not Consent to Sex With An Adult Man, a woman wrote of her sexual exploitation by older men when she was a teen, to which she nominally "consented":

 And so I created Prodigy chat rooms with names like "13yo girl home alone" and spent hours chatting and having phone sex with the men who would find me there. I "dated" men in their 20s and 30s that I met at the movie theater, online or hanging around local college town with my other underage girlfriends. I pursued these relationships with with Lolita-like abandon. The terrifying thing is how few adult men ever said no. 

I was not coerced. I consented to all these sexual encounters in the basest sense of the world. But I was making choices that I wasn't emotionally equipped to make. Legally, that's why statutory rape laws exist. Because like an intoxicated person, an underage person is not truly capable of informed consent...

...I spent the next decade of my life wrestling with demons borne partly of sexual trauma. I became addicted to drugs, risky sex, and alcohol. I still struggle to learn that there are better ways to get attention than with my body, that my sexuality isn't the only thing that makes me worthy of love and attention. 

Still, I made it out of my teen years alive; Cherice Morales wasn't so lucky. 

What I needed, and what she needed, were strong male role models in my life who knew how the fuck to say "No thanks" to a little girl's come-ons. Because it doesn't matter if a young girl is saying yes, it's an adult man's job to say no.

This is not simply about David Bowie and when people accept the notion that young teens or children can give consent they reinforce this terrible and violent rape justifying "myth of the teenage temptress" and empower and embolden those who enage in or excuse such conduct in their self-justifications and victim blaming. They do this as well when they simply refuse -- as was the case with so many and Woody Allen -- to believe the children's or young people's stories at all.

If it was ok for David Bowie, how was it wrong in this-or-that context where there was also supposed "consent" on the part of the child?

Make no mistake about how dangerous and destructive these ideas are and excusing such conduct is. When we undermine efforts to stop the lies and myths that perpetuate rape culture we ensure that sexual assault and abuse of children and young teens will, in many cases, continue to be seen not as rape but as some minor transgression that a (in the vast majority of cases) man was somehow enticed into.

On a broader level these excuses remind us why it really should be no surprise how the Bill Cosby and Jian Ghomeshi "extremes" of famous male rapists who were able to victimize women for such a very long time happened.

When we make excuses for or simply ignore the vile behaviour of so many other well-known celebrity or sports figure male serial abusers, spousal abusers, child sexual exploiters and rapists on every step of the vicious ladder that leads right up to them, we ensure that they will happen again.

They happen precisely because so many of us continue to think this way and believe these myths.

We must stop and counter all attempts to claim that there was a context in which it was acceptable for men like David Bowie, and many other rock stars at the time and after, to sexually exploit and abuse children or, in his case, young teenagers.

Because what you are saying if you believe this is that there are some cases and situations where it is permissible, understandable or forgivable for an adult to have had sexual intercourse or sexual contact with children, pre-teens and young teenagers and it is not.

It is wrong morally and legally.

It is never acceptable, understandable or forgivable and it is always rape.

In every single case.

rabble.ca's Tom Mulcair poll and what it says about the disconnect in the left

There is an interesting poll being taken on the left-wing website rabble.ca right now. It asks readers to vote on the following question:

In the 2015 federal election the NDP led by Tom Mulcair were sent to third-party status with only 44 seats in Parliament.
After what many felt was a crushing blow to the party, calls for Mulcair's resignation began to circulate, most notably from Ontario MPP Cheri DiNovo.
Do you think Tom Mulcair should remain leader of the NDP?

As of the time of this posting 74% of those who have voted have said Mulcair should go. While online polls are not at all scientific, it remains an interesting result as the website is directed at and primarily read by Canadians who would be politically inclined to support the NDP.

Again, while also not at all scientific, I have seen this sentiment widely reflected in the comments, threads and thoughts posted online by leftists and progressives broadly. It is rare indeed that one comes across unequivocal continuing support for Mulcair. At best one finds a reluctant support based on the notion that there supposedly does not seem to be an alternative to him at present.

And yet, among those with power and influence in the party the overwhelming narrative is that Mulcair and the NDP lost due to any number of mystical reasons related to things like the orbit of Pluto or the alignment of Saturn's rings, as opposed to having lost due to the utter incompetence of the party's leader, strategists and leadership and due to its totally uninspiring and facile attempt to be more centrist and liberal than the Liberals.

On this blog we have looked repeatedly at how the party and its elite refuses to take responsibility for their campaign and its consequences in posts like The NDP, Nathan Cullen, Paul Dewar and the Canadian social democratic delusion, Delusion continues to rule the day in Mulcair NDP, Doubling down on disaster, Mulcair's NDP ran a great campaign! We know this because they say they did, and others.

Broadly speaking progressive Canadians rejected the NDP in favour of the Liberals and many of those same Canadians, as well as leftists who may have held their nose and voted for the Mulcair NDP or who rejected both the Liberals and the NDP, do not share the delusional notion held by the party elite and many NDP members that the party lost in spite of its campaign as opposed to the actuality that it lost because of it.

This disconnect between the party and those that it needs to support it has never been wider and if it continues, and if Mulcair and his crew remain in place following a fundamentally flawed strategy with a compromised and failed leadership, the NDP slide to irrelevance as a meaningless second Liberal party with ever more tenuous ties to labour will be guaranteed to continue unabated.

As noted above in the rabble poll's preamble, one Ontario MPP, Cheri DiNovo, has had the courage of her convictions to step forward and publicly state the obvious. She has called for him to resign, in the Toronto Star, as leader as his leadership is "tainted" and as the party's strategy was wrong-headed.

But, to date, she is the only high-profile New Democrat, inside-or-outside of a parliament, to do so.

With the leadership review vote near at hand at the spring convention of the party, this does not bode well.

After the disastrous Ontario provincial campaign in 2014 the party delegates at the next provincial convention actually gave Horwath's leadership a higher approval vote than they had at the previous convention prior to the election! This is a testament to the party's deeply insular internal culture dominated by a small group of entrenched people and prone to moronic neo-conspiracy narratives about the "mainstream media" duping everyone, and so on, that are used to avoid any serious self-reflection or self-criticism.

Progressive and left wing Canadians outside the NDP know that Mulcair needs to go and that the party needs to find a reason to continue to exist.

But unless those with power within the party or those with influence over it take action it seems quite likely that Mulcair will easily carry the day at the convention and the suicidal and self-destructive course the party is on will continue.

See also: The NDP, Nathan Cullen, Paul Dewar and the Canadian social democratic delusion

See also: Just forget about a Canadian Corbyn -- How a lackluster left in Canada gets the Mulcair it deserves

Sauteed Garlic Pepper Steak with Provencal Mushrooms and Onions

Today we are going to kick off the first recipe of the year with one of my favourites -- a sauteed garlic pepper steak with Provencal mushrooms and onions.

This dish is best made with boneless steaks like Rib Eyes or New York strip loins.



First, for each steak you want to mince two cloves of garlic and blend with two tablespoons or so of extra virgin olive oil (EVOO). Put half of this mixture on each side and press in gently with a spoon. (You can also use pre-minced garlic in oil, in  which case you want to use about a teaspoon a side.) Then coat the steaks liberally with freshly ground black pepper and to taste with salt. Let the steaks sit, at room temperature, for around 45 minutes.

When you are almost ready to cook your steak chop up some mushrooms and season liberally with Herbs-de-Provence and salt and pepper to taste. Saute the mushrooms in EVOO in a large saucepan for around 5-7 minutes over medium-high heat or until done to your liking. You want to make enough mushrooms to cover each steak fully so plan accordingly. Set the mushrooms aside, covered, to keep them warm.

Then do the exact same thing with some chopped onion, again making enough to cover the steak thoroughly. Again, set aside, covered to keep warm.

Meanwhile, heat up a cast iron pan, ridged if you have one, and cook your seasoned steaks exactly as described in the previous post "Smashed Potatoes and Crosshatched Rib Eyes".

While I hope you cook your steaks rare, rare-medium or medium-rare, when they are done to your liking and you have let them rest, place each steak on a plate and cover with the mushrooms and onions.

This delicious dish, full of flavour, is great with a baguette, an Italian or Caesar salad, red wine and whatever else you like steak with!

Enjoy.

See also: Pesto pepper steak with sour cream & pickled peperoncini

See also: Lemon Minute Steaks with Sauteed Mushrooms

Stop sharing the refugees vs. seniors internet myths!

Click on image to enlarge

Have you seen this Facebook post circulating around?

Sadly and depressingly it has been shared more than 44,000 times as of this posting.

Old myths along these lines have been around for a long time and have been repeatedly disproved and shown to be false or totally misleading.

As always the claim is made that refugees are somehow receiving special treatment not afforded to "Canadians". Usually, as in this case, it is claimed or implied that they receive more assistance than Canada's seniors.

This particularly odious example claims that the Vancouver Sun had an article showing that refugees would get thousands of dollars a month for food alone.

What the article actually says related to this is:

In Vancouver, due to a shortage of suitable accommodations, ISS of B.C. is suggesting the Jericho military barracks could be used as a temporary measure to house refugees before moving them to permanent housing.
As it stands now, government-assisted refugees will spend their initial two to three weeks in a reception centre in Metro Vancouver, Friesen said. This could be Welcome House in downtown Vancouver or a local hotel.
“We’re being picky. We want hotels that have kitchenettes so people can cook themselves. We want to have hotels, ideally, with more than 40 rooms because we want to centralize it as much as we can with a limited number of sites. We’re looking at hotels in Vancouver, Richmond and Surrey currently,” he explained.

and:

Between now and March, Ottawa needs 300 rooms daily in each of the two cities to house about 600 refugees per night, according to a notice posted Friday on a government procurement website. Suppliers will also be expected to provide meals.
The length of stays will vary: some will leave the next morning, others will need “two or more nights.”
Hotels will be expected to provide up to three meals a day. It states the government will reimburse up to $15 per person for breakfast, $16 for lunch and $30 for dinner.

In other words this allowance will not be for all refugees, only those who have to be put up in hotels with no kitchenettes and it will be entirely temporary! It will also not be going to the refugees but to the hotel. In some cases, as is plainly and clearly stated, it will be for only one night.

It will not be for months or, as is the case with senior's government pensions and benefits, for the rest of their lives!

These types of nasty falsehoods and distortion of facts have been around for so long and have been circulated by so many ignorant people that the government of Canada itself has had to post a notice related to it that states:

Do government-assisted refugees get more income support and benefits than Canadian pensioners do?
No. Refugees do not get more financial help from the federal government than Canadian pensioners do. A widely circulated email makes this false claim. The email mistakenly includes the one-time start-up payment as part of the monthly payment. The amount of monthly financial support that government-assisted refugees get is based on provincial social assistance rates. It is the minimum amount needed to cover only the most basic food and shelter needs.
Many refugees selected for resettlement to Canada have been forced to flee their country because of extreme hardship. Some may have been living in refugee camps for many years. When they arrive in Canada, they must start their lives again in a country very different from their own.
In keeping with Canada’s proud humanitarian traditions, individuals and families get immediate and essential services and support to help them become established in Canada.

In an article entitled "A mistake that travelled around the world and back again"  The Toronto Star also dispelled complete fictions along these lines stating:

Comparing amounts each might receive is like comparing apples oranges and bananas too, given the various means of government assistance for refugees and seniors, but here are the basic facts. First, privately sponsored refugees are not eligible for government assistance — support is the sponsors’ responsibility.
When they arrive in Canada, government-assisted refugees are eligible for monthly support aligned with provincial social assistance rates – in Ontario, less than $800 monthly. They are also eligible for a one-time — not monthly — payment to help set up their households. That’s estimated to be about $2,500 for a family of four and $950 for an individual. Monthly income support for government-assisted refugees is provided during their first year in Canada only – less time, if they become self-sufficient sooner.
According to CARP, Canadian seniors currently receive $569.95 a month in Old Age Security upon reaching age 65, for life. Lower income pensioners are also eligible for the Guaranteed Income Supplement (an additional maximum $772 a month, reduced depending on other income.) None of this takes into account what is paid by the Canada Pension Plan to those who have contributed through their earnings years.
“We certainly argue that there is a growing number of seniors who need more income supports, and we lobby for that, but we never argue that the support should come from denying much needed support to refugee families,” Susan Eng, CARP’s executive vice-president told me.

 So all of these narratives are just total nonsense.

One might also note that if any of the people sharing these false or misleading memes or chain emails actually cared about the plight faced by seniors or those living in poverty in the country they would actually mobilize and organize to do something about it -- something other than sitting around on their computers smugly sharing ludicrous internet rubbish seeking to scapegoat refugees for our own failings as a society.

See also: Stop sharing the false -- and racist -- Ontario niqab driver's licence meme

See also: BC NDP posts a meme about "foreign" workers -- Xenophobes show up in approval

The NDP, Nathan Cullen, Paul Dewar and the Canadian social democratic delusion

As we head into 2016 there is little that is more pathetic and disturbing from the point-of-view of that ever narrowing band of Canadian social democrats or "democratic socialists" than the descent of the New Democratic Party into a state of abject delusional thinking and total political irrelevance.

This is highlighted by the party's "group-think" circular emptiness that has led it to a dead end from which there is, at present, seemingly no exit.

Going into 2015 the NDP, led by former provincial Quebec Liberal cabinet minister Tom Mulcair, appeared to be in a position to actually take power. The Faustian bargain that party members had made by placing an allegedly "electable" Third Way, Tony Blair style leader -- the most right-wing leader the party has had without any doubt -- looked as if it had a chance of "success" in the electoral sense that was now all that mattered to those who were still hanging around.

Yet this bargain failed catastrophically and disastrously as Mulcair led the party to what can only be seen as one of the most unprecedented failures of "mainstream" bourgeois politics in Canada with the NDP becoming the first party in the country's history to allow a third place party, in this case the Liberals led by Justin Trudeau, to catapult themselves over the Official Opposition and into power.

And it all happened in an entirely predictable, slow-motion derailment the signs of which were clear to many of us on the left but were completely ignored by New Democrat partisans out of what can only be described as an internal party culture that demands almost suicidal compliance and self-destructive obedience to what turned out to be a completely inept leadership clique.

Despite that fact that many left critics, including on this blog, warned that the obvious and intentional shift to the right in the framing of the party's policies would not end well and was out of touch with where the Canadian people were today, the NDP and its partisans insisted that a centrist, uninspiring, empty-headed stab at office would deliver not the New Jerusalem but rather the well-paying jobs that come from the trappings of power and the bragging rights that accompany one's team "winning" something as when a room of chicken wing eating, beer swilling football fans applaud the triumph of this or that side in this or that championship match.

There was glory to be had. And years of very, very good salaries and pontificating soundbites of "social democratic" politicians being so very responsible and so very governmental as they gave press conferences to explain why more press conferences were needed to admit that the new government was not going to do much of anything.

Tragically for the party something happened on the road to Ottawa. And that something was the unexpected political smarts of Justin Trudeau -- or, at the very least, Trudeau's political advisers.

Sensing the obvious change in public opinion they ran, as did Kathleen Wynne the year before in Ontario, a campaign nominally on the "left" of the NDP. A campaign long on grand rhetoric and, of course, bereft of any real meaning. They were, however, only able to do this as the NDP had abandoned the field altogether and chosen to run a campaign that sought not simply to "reassure" voters that the party would not be much of a change but that also tried to dampen any expectations that its election would accomplish anything in advance.

This proved to be an error that was punished as craven errors like this by power hungry left politicians often are.

In some ways, perhaps, it would have been better for leftists had this shell of an echo of a social democratic party won if only to hasten the disillusion that needs to occur with the NDP in order for a new left electoral movement within or without the party to emerge, but the Blairites commanding the ship were utterly incapable of delivering results.

And so we are in the bizarre political moment in our history where the NDP is seeking to continue to justify its very existence given its now total insignificance and yet cannot do so without attempting to maintain the fiction that it lost not due to its actual political cowardice and emptiness but rather due to this-that-or-the-next-thing none of which had anything to do, of course, with the cabal of political dimwits who ran the campaign.

And so we have bright lights like Nathan Cullen, who ran for the leadership of the NDP in 2012 favouring a merger with the Liberals, and Paul Dewar absolutely refusing to accept any type of responsibility or to admit that the campaign may have been fundamentally misguided.

Instead they insist that it was all due to the niqab issue, "celebrity", or whatever other pathetic excuse for their own failings they can grasp at.

Dewar on CBC Radio sounded almost as if he could not understand how any of it happened.

Cullen, meanwhile, creates an absurd alternate reality where social democratic and social democratic governments cannot run deficits or where allegedly "working people" (as if this is who they aimed their middle-class narrative driven campaign at) will not abide them despite the fact that this can be clearly and demonstrably be proven to be false.

The NDP did not go down fighting on principle as these folks seeking to justify their continued paycheques would imply.

It was not the media and the voters who were wrong, as New Democrats seem to insist, it was the NDP!

It lost entirely due to its abject and obvious lack of principle, its dour and unpleasant leader and its complete inability to confront the vapid "sunny ways" rhetoric of Justin Trudeau or to come up with the "ambitious" ideas that the Liberals were worried they would come up with.

In other words, they lost entirely because they chose a centrist vision, not despite it.

There already was a Diet Coke on offer in the Liberal party. The NDP attempt to frame itself as the Coke Zero option might have succeeded in the horrible empty game that is today's mainstream narrative, but it not only did not deserve to, it ultimately didn't.

New Democrats appear incapable of grasping that in attempting to be the Liberal party they lost to it. In attempting to supplant the Liberal party they became it.

When the NDP ceased to be an actual alternative to our present political reality it ceased to have any reason to exist.

This or that wave of public opinion in a very short period could make or break it. Actual Liberals with personality and a paint-by-numbers vision could derail it.

There is no mystery to this. It was telegraphed. The only people on the left who failed to see it coming were New Democrats.

Now the party is claiming to enter a period of introspection while its representatives continue to deny their own culpability in the debacle they participated in and facilitated.

Denial will not change anything or serve those who desperately need a left political alternative well. It serves only to give so many candidates, apologists and party members cover when they seek to absolve themselves or explain why they did not speak up when it might have mattered.

But it will allow the NDP and its truncated narrative and decimated caucus a thread upon which to cling to seek to justify its continued existence when it has become an ideological and political irrelevancy.

See also: Catastrophe: The NDP lost because it deserved to

See also: Doubling down on disaster

Caribbean Goat, Michael's West Indian, Ukrainian Cookery & more -- The Top 5 Food Posts of 2015!

A few days ago we posted the Top Ten Blog Posts of 2015 on The Left Chapter. As any regular reader of this blog knows, The Left Chapter also has many food posts. This year, as with the political posts, many of them were also contributed by several different lefty foodies!



There have been posts about Beef Shank Potato Carrot Dutch Oven Casserole, Southern Style Chicken Wings Stove-top Deep Fried, Maria's Pork Schnitzel with Oma Philomena's Potato Salad, Zucchini Fundido, Spinach, Mushroom and Walnut Pie, Pesto pepper steak with sour cream & pickled peperoncini, Fiery Caribbean style peel-and-eat shrimp, and even, yes, a Sardine Sandwich with Sauteed Spinach, Garlic & Jalapeno!

I want to thank everyone who contributed recipes to the blog and to our readership for such a great launch and I look forward to what 2016 brings.

Here, without further ado, are the top five food posts for 2015:

1) Caribbean Style Goat with Potatoes in a Dutch Oven

2) Michael's West Indian Flavor: Perfect Oxtail in New Toronto

3) Ukrainian Cookery Recipes w. Borscht, Vareniki, Cabbage Rolls & more -- Vintage Cookbook

(This post actually led to the #9 post of the year Ukrainian "Scalloped Beef" Revisited)

4) Sauteed Seasoned Chicken Breasts in a Garlic Mushroom Sauce

5) BBQ Grilled Yellow Hot Peppers with Prosciutto & Cream Cheese

Thanks again for a great first year. See you in 2016.

Do you have a left point-of-view or opinion, a recipe or a story you want to share?

Send them to The Left Chapter via theleftchapter@outlook.com!