Sudoko

Apparently this is the newest fad -- its been going on for months in European newspapers, for years in Japan -- but I just heard about it so it is new to me!
Anyway, the aim in a Sudoko puzzle is to fill in the blanks with numbers. Each square must contain each of the numbers 1 to 9, and each row and each column of the whole puzzle also contain each the numbers 1 to 9. Its a logic game, not a math game. Here's an example of a typical Sudoko puzzle:

Above is a typical Sudoko puzzle -- click here for the solution. For background on the game and the fad, see the Wikipedia article here. And for a web-version of Sudoko, here is a webpage where anyone can play.

Sewing them back on . . .

. . . one stitch at a time -- Senate votes to restrict treatment of detainees
One of the many hysterically funny scenes from Fawlty Towers is when Basil is trying to hide from Sybil that he has been betting. She sneers at him "Basil, you know what I will do to you if I find out you have been gambling," and he mutters "You'll have to sew them back on first."
Anyway, I was reminded of that visual when I read about the Senate vote on the anti-torture provision.

Another great line of the day

Atrios sums up the source of right-wing anger : against Miers:

Wingnuttia is rather angry at the choice. I don't think this is because they're really concerned that she's not conservative enough for their tastes, although that's part of it. They're angry because this was supposed to be their nomination. This is was their moment. They didn't just want a stealth victory, they wanted parades and fireworks. They wanted Bush to find the wingnuttiest wingnut on the planet, fully clothed and accessorized in all the latest wingnut fashions, not just to give them their desired Court rulings, but also to publicly validate their influence and power. They didn't just want substantive results, what they wanted even more were symbolic ones. They wanted Bush to extend a giant middle finger to everyone to the left of John Ashcroft. They wanted to watch Democrats howl and scream and then ultimately lose a nasty confirmation battle. They wanted this to be their 'WE RUN THE COUNTRY AND THERE'S NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT' moment. Whatever kind of judge she would be, she doesn't provide them with that.

I thought this was a perceptive comment. There is an amazing degree of "gottcha" in the US political sphere.
It behooves us to try to avoid that kind of wingnuttery. For example, I don't agree with Stephen Harper and the Conservatives, but I don't think he is an incompetent moron who hates Canada -- in the US, it seems like the right wing is encouraged to feel that way about the librulls. Maybe its just divine inspiration.

Great line of the day

Mike Whitney writes in Iraq: a right-rolicking cock-up:

Rumsfeld has no intention of allowing the free media to chronicle and photograph the orgy of terror he has engendered in Iraq. The American people must never see the countless lives that are sacrificed or ruined so they pedal-about in their behemoth luxury-vehicles. An iron curtain has been drawn around Iraq, allowing the invading power to wreak havoc across the country with complete impunity. Nearly a full year has passed since Falluja was leveled in a drunken fit of revenge and still the apocryphal 'free press' hasn't produced pictures of the devastation for their American audience.

Emphasis mine. Maybe I noticed this paragraph because I have been thinking along the same lines as Mike Whitney that there is bad stuff happening in Iraq these days which isn't getting reported because no one is there to do this job.

Sisters in Spirit

Here is a campaign I just read about -- Sisters in Spirit -- which is aiming to raise awareness about the number of missing Aboriginal women in Canada. It is at least 500 since 1985. On the site, they list three Saskatchewan teenagers who went missing just this summer. It is very frightening to realize how little publicity these cases get.
The federal Liberals are supposed to be supporting them with some bucks for a hotline and database and research funds, but after the big announcement the dollars aren't coming.

Heritage Minister Liza Frulla, responsible for Status of Women, now says the money will be released sometime after that Oct. 17 hearing. She has been repeatedly criticized in the Commons for not moving sooner. "Over the summer six more aboriginal women disappeared," Conservative MP Lynne Yelich of Saskatchewan said Friday. "The Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations issued a warning of the potential risk of abduction. The problem is real. The Liberal reaction is not. When is the government going to treat this with the urgency it deserves?"

I agree. Its has just too easy for society to ignore the disappearance of Aboriginal women; without this research, the magnitude of the problem is difficult to grasp. How many years did it take for the Vancouver police to realize that women were being systematically murdered? Even here in Saskatoon, we have had serial killings of Aboriginal women -- a fellow was convicted about 10 years ago -- and it looks like Edmonton may have a serial killer operating now.

Sometimes your best friends WILL tell you

CBC Unlocked is reportingon Ambassador Frank McKenna's speech in Toronto: "The United States is a wonderful creation . . . (however) the government of the United States is in large measure dysfunctional."
Now, it shocked me to read this -- it seemed like, there's our boy McKenna, pissing off the Bush administration again! But he didn't intend a gratitous slam at the Bush administration -- no, actually he was just talking about the whole US federal government.
And to a Canadian, yes, it does look pretty disfunctional.
Here is what McKenna said:

The founders in the United States of America, because of the historical antecedence of the birth of that country tried to create a balance of powers that is unique to them. And what they’ve done is to create institutionalized gridlock. In large measure the government of the United States is so gridlocked that it does not function the way we know government would function. It might surprise you to know that the President of the United States doesn’t have all that much power. He doesn’t have power unless it’s assigned to him with respect to matters of trade. He cannot introduce a single bill. He doesn’t have that power. Even the budget produced by the President simply goes up to Congress and they can do whatever they want with it. He’s got very little power when you compare his powers to that of the Prime Minister of Canada.
Party discipline is virtually nonexistent in the United States of America. Everybody tends to freelance. It would be like having 535 Carolyn Parrishs all loose in your country. (Laughter) And that’s why in the 107th Congress, the recent Congress, 9,000 bills were introduced, 377 bills were passed. It is so difficult navigating a bill and building consensus that to get anything through the system is virtually impossible.
It’s a fact in the United States of America that the popularity of senators and congress people go up when they’re not in session. The people in the United States are so fed up with the gridlock which they see in Washington. Because it’s so gridlocked, so complex, everybody needs their own navigator. And as a result you see a huge explosion in a population of navigators. One senator has something like 75 people working for him which is more than the entire staff of my office when I was Premier of the province of New Brunswick by a factor of three; just to navigate through the system and to support the relationships with other Congressional leaders in the Congress of the United States.
There are 35,000 lobbyists registered in Washington. Imagine, 35,000 all designed to help you navigate through this complex system. They have more lawyers in Washington per capita than anywhere else in the world. And that’s why they say the streets of Washington aren’t safe to walk at night. (Laughter). My point is this. There are these thousands of people being paid to help navigate through the system and to protect the interests of the particular interest groups. My message to you as Canadian business leaders is, that you cannot afford not to be there.
If up to 40% of your production is going into that marketplace you’ve got to be there just as the American lobbyists and the American lawyers are there. And we don’t do a very good job as a country of protecting their interest in that marketplace. But again we’ve got to come back to what I said before about self-interest. In trying to resolve disputes we need to figure out the self-interest that will get through the maze and get to the prize at the end.
For example we recently had a case, it didn’t make a lot of news so you might have forgotten about it, where there was a missile being launched from Cape Canaveral and the solid rocket booster looked like it was going to fall on Newfoundland. Well Newfoundland didn’t like that one little bit. It was going to fall close to Newfoundland, they didn’t like it one little bit. So we tried to rattle some chains in Washington and man, it was just like, you know where’s Newfoundland, why do we care? I mean a solid rocket booster on Newfoundland, what’s the big deal? Well did you know that a lot of Texas-based oil companies have oil rigs there? Well why didn’t you say that in the first place? (Laughter). It just changes the chemistry of the issue very, very quickly.

So if O'Reilly and Limbaugh start getting after McKenna next week, at least you will know now what he actually said.

Go team go!

Lions lose second in a row: So once again, we see a news story where those darned mainstream media miss the real story.
The story is not that BC lost, but that the Riders won! Our boys seem to have finally figured out how to keep from losing close games in the last few minutes. They are actually able to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, instead of the other way round.
Go Riders!

Nevermore

I love it when clever people are able to take a poem and adapt it like this. Driftglass writes Quoth the Hammer:

. . . Take thy dick from out my mouth, and take thy form from off my door!'
Quoth the Hammer, 'Nevermore.'
But the Hammer, never quitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the throat of my Dead Mandate, my ghost of 2004;
And his eyes still have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming.
And the lamplight o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my Mandate from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted---nevermore!"

Read the whole thing.

Well, duhhh!

Its about time they figured this out: "The U.S. generals running the war in Iraq presented a new assessment of the military situation in public comments and sworn testimony this week: The 149,000 U.S. troops currently in Iraq are increasingly part of the problem."

Racism, pure and simple

Looking back over the last several weeks, we can see the real story of the hurricanes now emerge: that the evacuation and dislocation of hundreds of thousands of black people has revealed a vicious and ugly racism in American society, like a multi-legged horror exposed by the overturning of a deeply embedded rock.
From Hurricane Katrina, we saw how the hysterical "looting mobs of black people will kill us if we try to help them" myth combined with the patronizing "its their own fault because they didn't do what they were told" myth.
Together, these myths allowed federal and state authorities and the Red Cross to collude in the abandonment of tens of thousands of old people and single mothers and children in central New Orleans.
These myths would not have been told about white people. White people would not have had to wait for four or five long, hot, miserable days for help.
The crowds waiting so patiently a month ago to die outside the Dome and the Convention Centre were "so poor and so black" in CNN commentator Wolf Blitzer's unintentionally revealing phrase. And then we found out that the Gretna police force were so afraid of the black mob myth that they refused to let these suffering New Orleans people evacuate to safety through their community.
From areas where other New Orleans evacuees fled, they get comments like Queen Barbara's, about how scared she is that too many New Orleans people will want to stay in Texas, and we note the growth of urban legends of violence and ingratitude. We are now seeing stories about how black people are going to be warehoused in trailer parks and that the Bush administration does not intend New Orleans to be a black-majority city again.
And Hurricane Rita was no better. Many more of the Rita evacuees where white, so the racism issue was not thrown into such sharp relief in the national media with this evacuation. But don't think it was not a major factor for black people themselves.
Steve Gilliard found this story from the Beaumont, Texas, Enterprise newspaper titled Evacuation "like a horror movie"

. . . 3,000 evacuees . . . fled Hurricane Rita aboard a convoy of about 50 Beaumont Independent School District school buses. Several bus drivers from the convoy . . described seeing people on their front lawns glaring at them with shotguns in hand, and pickup trucks with nooses hanging in back (most of the bus passengers were black).The drivers said whenever they tried to stop to rest or let their passengers use the restroom, town officials had court orders waiting for them to get out of town, an assertion those town officials later denied . . .Driver Toni Soularie, 49, said she nearly had a violent confrontation when she pulled into a rest area. "This officer said he was going to shoot me if I didn't get back on the bus," she said. "At that point I was prepared to let him shoot me. I had this invalid on the bus who was already embarrassed because she urinated all over herself. And I was not going to let her embarrass herself again. We just got off. But the officer stayed right there with me - made sure we were going to get back on." . . . in Kilgore, they thought about stopping in an empty Wal-Mart parking lot, but again were turned away. The town, drivers said, was one of the roughest portions of their journey. "When we tried to exit there, cars would actually back up on the ramps and force us to get back on the freeway," Cassandra Francis, a 46-year-old BISD driver, said.

And in the Comments of the Gilliard blog was posted this story from a California newspaper, The Sonoma West Times & News, about the experiences of a local volunteer who travelled to an East Texas shelter to help out - Hostilities, racism follow local emergency worker

. . . What got to him most was the shouting. Local officials and law enforcement officers regularly shouted and screamed at the evacuees. "I saw people in authority yelling at evacuees in public settings, the condescension. I was told by numerous police and sheriffs that 'These people don't take care of themselves, they don't respect each other, they are crack addicts, dope addicts.' And my experience of the same people was quite the contrary," said Mazer. He pointed out that he has worked for 11 years working with the homeless in Sonoma County, and led the mental health services at the Armory in Santa Rosa for five years. "I'd know. I saw respectful, mindful people who under the conditions were extraordinary in the respect they maintained for themselves and for others."

Digby points us to this story in the Miami New Times, about the racist rants on one of Florida's major right-wing radio stations:

. . . some callers vehemently disagreed with her [radio show host Kelley Mitchell's] negative characterization of the black race, while others really liked what they heard. "My father told me that when the blacks move in, everything is going to be really bad," one caller said, adding, "He was right!" "I don't think there's anything wrong with what you're saying," she responded. "That's because there are cases in Liberty City of that happening.... You've got these places that are trash. The only explanation was that blacks were brought to America [against their will] ... their entrance into America was different than anyone else's." The Oklahoma-bred broadcaster told listeners her mother was once mugged by two African-American women and said if she were a poor black mother, she'd be "angry and embarrassed" at her race for its behavior. On the other hand, she pointed out that wealthier folks fared really well in the storm's aftermath. "I read a beautiful story about people in an upscale neighborhood" who went into a grocery store and "took only what they needed," she said.

Yes, we white people are just so unselfish, aren't we, we just do that type of thing quite naturally, don't we? Like the white guys who ran Enron, for example, and Halliburton and those Quebec ad agencies and . . .
Racism is so pervasive, I notice that even people who consider themselves to be political progressives are not immune. Bloggers Brad DeLong and Matt Yglesias both defended Bill Bennet's remarks about how aborting the pregnancies of all black women would reduce the crime rate. Neither of these bloggers appeared to realize the overall problem with Bennet's remarks. It is even beyond what Armando at Daily Kos describes as insensitivity.
It is, quite simply, racist to use a unnecessarily race-based example to prove a point. Bennet's discussion was about using abortion to cut the crime rate. Now, he could very easily and more accurately have used "poor people" in his example -- as in "you could abort every poor baby in this country and your crime rate would go down" -- or he could have used "teenagers". But it never even occured to him. He just didn't think of it. When he thought "crime" he thought "black people" and out of that racist mindset popped his racist example.
Bennet's use of such an example, and the defense of such statements by DeLong and Yglesias, just shows how basic and pervasive racism is within American culture.

When will the Canadian government show some guts?

So now a private BC businessman is stepping up to the plate to defend the Vancouver Three.
This story -- Private B.C. citizen to file drug charges against pot activist Marc Emery -- describes the effort of a Vancouver "philanthropist and businessman" named David McCann to block the deportation of Marc Emery and his co-accused - the Vancouver Three - to the US. He wants to get charges filed against them in Canada -- a Canadian judge or jury still might find them guilty here, of course, but they wouldn't be facing the US draconian minimum-sentencing laws which would send them to prison for decades.

"Canada has been hypocritical in allowing Emery to sell marijuana seeds and collecting thousands of dollars in taxes while the city of Vancouver gave him a business licence for his pot paraphernalia store. We have let him operate and now we let the Americans walk into our country and charge a man who they will probably lock away for the rest of his natural life in the United States for doing something that the government of Canada condoned. And you know, I got a problem with that as a Canadian.

And a lot of us also have a problem with that, too, Mr. McCann. And I wonder when the Canadian government will act.

Marching does matter

After last weekend's anti-war marches, I have been reading blogs here and elsewhere asking whether such marches make any difference.
They do.
I have been saying for years that I thought the only thing which stopped the US from using nuclear weapons to try to win the war in Vietnam was the anti-war movement. Now, the PBS documentary The Sixties: The Years that Shaped a Generation agrees with me.
My assertion was based on the premise that there was no number of American troops, no strategy, no alliance or configuration, could ever have "won" the Vietnam war for the US. So the idea of trying to force the enemy to sue for peace by using a nuclear weapon would have been increasingly tempting as the war dragged on and on. Sure enough, Henry Kissinger describes a period in 1969 when Nixon was considering nuking North Vietnam and Cambodia and was threatening North Vietnam with this tactic.
What changed Nixon's mind was the October 15, 1969 National Moratorium nation-wide antiwar marches, when two million Americans marched in every city for peace. This convinced Nixon that the people would never tolerate the use of nuclear weapons to try to win the war.
So marching makes a difference -- maybe more of a difference than anyone at the time ever knows.

Great line of the day

From The Smirking Chimp's reprint of Gene Lyons: 'To the cronies go the spoils':

The Bush administration's fundamental problem is that it has substituted ideology for practicality and loyalty for competence at every turn. It's running the country like a business, all right. Unfortunately, that business is Enron, combining fantastical theories and astonishing greed.

Welcome to Michaelle Jean

Canada's new Governor-General:





I haven't really been following this story or the controversy, but today everybody seemed pretty happy with our new GG. The CTV news story was talking about how happy and proud Canada's Haitian community is tonight. Her speech was warm and personal and yet did not hesitate to tackle tough issues like separatism. So if she keeps on like this, she will do fine.

The time of the “two solitudes” that for too long described the character of this country is past. The narrow notion of “every person for himself” does not belong in today’s world, which demands that we learn to see beyond our wounds, beyond our differences for the good of all. Quite the contrary: we must eliminate the spectre of all the solitudes and promote solidarity among all the citizens who make up the Canada of today. As well, we must make good use of our prosperity and our influence wherever the hope that we represent offers the world an extra measure of harmony. And that is how I am determined that the position I occupy as of today will be more than ever a place where citizens’ words will be heard, where the values of respect, tolerance, and sharing that are so essential to me and to all Canadians, will prevail. Those values, which are paramount for me, are linked inextricably with the Canada I love.

War Porn

The most recent "war porn" story brings up an aspect of the Iraq war which hasn't really been discussed much until now -- just how sexualized this war is.
If you haven't seen anything about the war porn story yet, don't be surprised -- it was initially broken by the East Bay Express in San Fransisco, and publicized yesterday by Americablog, so the story is just starting to get national traction and is being covered by Associated Press as we speak. Be warned, these photos will make you sick -- but sicker still is the commentary from users of the porn site where these photos are posted.
Digby writes:

There is something very disturbing about the images of sexual torture we've seen and heard about in this war, generally. The forced masturbation, the pyramids, the female interrogators and the fake menstrual blood, the constant nudity, all of it. Violence against prisoners in the new Human Rights Watch report is expressed as 'fucking' instead of beating. Not 'fucking up' or 'fucking with' --- just plain 'fucking' as in 'I walking in and saw him fucking the prisoner.' I cannot help but think that something has gone terribly wrong here. From the top of the hierarchy ordering sexual humiliation techniques, to obscure web-sites selling war gore and pictures of girls next door together, this is a very sexualized war and it's damned strange, particularly coming from a regime that pretends to be an arbiter of strict sexual morals. It's clear that the leadership of this country is extremely concerned with consensual sex between two adults but they find images of sexual violence and kinky torture techniques to be thoroughly acceptable among soldiers and useful to the war effort. This is a very odd perception and one that leads us back to the conclusion that something extremely unhealthy has invaded our body politic.

One could say that all wars have their evil aspects, and that war is by definition pornographic, of course, but I think at least in part it also goes back to the particular illegality and immorality of this particular war.
For the first time, the US is fighting a preemptive war, one which did not receive any sanction from the UN, one in which no participant asked for US help, one which was based on an illegal rationale of regime change.
And it turned out to be an unjustified war, because Iraq actually posed no threat to the US at all. Neocon belief to the contrary, Iraq didn't even threaten Israel, in spite of Saddam's bombastic support for the Infidada suicide bombers.
It is an immoral war which the Bush administration is still forcing its troops to fight. There is no principle here and the troops know it. All this talk about "fighting terrorism" is just so much bunk and they know it in their hearts -- they are the occupiers, the oppressors, and the occupied just want them to leave.
So it is not surprising that the immorality of the war as a whole is now being reflected in the individual immorality of some of the troops fighting it.
I blogged last week that watching the TV series "Over There" is like watching World War II from the German side. The reality is becoming just as chilling.
Here is the Human Rights Watch report on Captain Ian Fishback's account of what happened to prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. Fishback wants the military leadership to accept its ultimate responsibility.

Look, the guys who did this aren’t dishonorable men. It’s not like they are a bunch of vagabonds. They shown more courage and done more things in the time that I’ve spent with them than I could cover in probably a week of talking to you. They are just amazing men, but they’re human. If you put them in a situation, which is the officer’s responsibility, where they are put in charge of somebody who tried to kill them or maybe killed their friend, bad things are going to happen. It’s the officer’s job to make sure bad things don’t happen . . . [We need] to address the fact that it was an officer issue and by trying to claim that it was “rogue elements” we seriously hinder our ability to ensure this doesn’t happen again. And, that has not only moral consequences, but it has practical consequences in our ability to wage the War on Terror. We’re mounting a counter-insurgency campaign, and if we have widespread violations of the Geneva Conventions, that seriously undermines our ability to win the hearts and minds of the Muslim world. If America holds something as the moral standard, it should be unacceptable for us as a people to change that moral standard based on fear. The measure of a person or a people’s character is not what they do when everything is comfortable. It’s what they do in an extremely trying and difficult situation, and if we want to claim that these are our ideals and our values then we need to hold to them no matter how dark the situation.

Well, of course. But your chances of getting military leadership to accept their responsibility for what is going on are pretty slim. Here is the most recent bit from the Army showing just how much it intends to back up its troops. This is from a report just published in National Review Online entitled "Detainee Details: Accountability and progress" by Army secretary Francis Harvey and Army chief of staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker

Against this backdrop of honor, service and sacrifice, a small number of our soldiers have not lived up to the Army values. Their actions, or failures to act, have brought discredit to our great institution, and worse, led to the injury or deaths of detainees in military custody. While the actions of these few soldiers were clearly reprehensible, they are not representative of Army values; nor were they in any way, shape, or form authorized by Army policy, doctrine, or training.

Sigh. So much for Captain Fishback's belief that the military leadership would take any responsibility for anything.
You're on your own, boys.
"I was just following orders" isn't going to be an option for you, either.