• Hypercolour GMO plant detects landmines - evidently Frankenfoods are capable both of ending life on earth as we know it and of being helpful little friends [via bOINGbOING and Core77]
  
• Old (free!) DOS games - just in time for exam-period procrastifest, too [via MeFi]
  
• Submit your Kinkos print job online - Sure beats paying for computer time by the quarter-hour just to print your friggen' PDFs (no, I'm not bitter). I'm thinking of printing some of Sam Brown's explodingdog art for my apartment (he says: ok), so this might come in handy.

Inside Ink, Inc.

From The Tyee :

Correctional Services Canada plans to open six inmate-run tattoo parlors in federal penitentiaries this year. Throughout the 1990s, CSC ran a tattoo removal program to allow for easier reintegration into society. The new tattoo parlors – or as CSC refers to them, “tattoo pilot programs” - are being used to minimize the spread of infectious diseases... no gang or racist tattoos will be allowed in the parlor. But decoding gang tattoos is not as easy as spotting a swastika on someone’s arm... [read more]

Chalk up another win for reasonable harm reduction. You can bet that Reform Alliance Conservative MPs in the House of Commons will make a stink about this as yet another example of the 'vacation resort atmosphere' in our prisons (did you know those cretins can vote? Scandalous!) but the attention span of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition is notoriously short.

Rollin' out the red and white carpet

Says Linda McQuaig:

When Paul Martin talks about being 'at the table,' there's no question which table he means: the one where Canada signs on to the U.S. anti-missile scheme... [read more @ rabble.ca]

Says Naomi Klein:

[L]etter writers from across the nation are united in their outrage — not that the steely-eyed, smoking soldier makes mass killing look cool, but that the laudable act of mass killing makes the grave crime of smoking look cool. [read more @ rabble]

Says Rick Salutin:

The ballistic missile defence system (BMD) that George Bush is bringing in his briefcase to discuss with Paul Martin strikes many Canadians as irrational or plain crazy. Most scientists say it won't work. And if it did — who would they use it on? The bin Ladenites have no missiles... [read more @ rabble]

Might I interest you in a petition, friend?

Hotel Rwanda

This film, winner of the People's Choice Award at this year's Toronto International Film Festival, will be hitting theatres around Christmas. Don Cheadle plays an hotelier who saves 1200 fellow Rwandans from the genocide; from the trailer, it seems that Nick Nolte plays "Colonel Oliver", probably based on Canadian Lt. Gen. (Retired) Romeo Dallaire. I'd say I can't wait to see this, but I probably can -- Dallaire's book was an excellent, horrific read and watching the trailer for this messed me up a little bit, too. For more, hit up the IMDB entry.

What a wonderful idea

I like bananas. For a while, I boycotted bananas for social justic reasons. I caved rather quickly, though, because I like bananas. Today, I purchased a bananaguard. Soon, my bananas will be eminently portable.

Thank you, bananaguard.

• NORML and SES Research team up on pot decriminalization poll packed /w delicious, delicious pie charts - "people are way ahead of government on this issue... prohibition isn’t working now and it never will;" 60% of respondents say small-quantity posessors "should be left alone." There's also a longer, detailed report for stoners and skeptics alike.
  
• CFS steps up campaign against income-contingent loan repament with brilliant, prop-heavy theatrics on Parliament Hill - "Currently, the cumulative student debt in Canada exceeds $10.7-billion, and the total increases by $17 every second." [see "Students in Hock" @ The Ottawa Citizen]

Vandalism in the key of MacOS

more graffiti 2,

Observe the photography of that Reagan fellow. Word on the street is he'll play me in the theatrical adaptation of the story of my life. Or my complaints. About Tim Horton's. Or something. More on that later.

• Kitchener-Waterloo MP Andrew Telegdi among 6 Grit naysayers on pot bill - This was just a procedural vote, but I smell a letter-writing campaign [at The Hill Times]
  
• Alberta NDP doubles up, Klein's Tories secure majority - 4 heads are better than 2, that's what I always say. Well, not always, but I'm really grasping for a silver lining here...
  
• Kiwi dolphins protect swimmers from shark attack [from Reuters via MeFi]

Twangin' it to the man

Forget Huckabees... I heart Cuff The Duke. 'Ballad of a Lonely Construction Worker' was worth breaking the law to hear live at the Underground in Hamilton last week, and equally worth breaking the law to grab (marginally inferior studio version) via P2P. But then buy the album, Life Stories for Minimum Wage, 'cause it's the gentlemanly thing to do.

The best way I can describe it would be something like emo-spaghetti-western-indie. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

• A New Yorker article on a play about a book about a serial killer, and the copyright/plagarism distinction - "The final dishonesty of the plagiarism fundamentalists is to encourage us to pretend that these chains of influence and evolution do not exist, and that a writer’s words have a virgin birth and an eternal life." [via Kottke]
  
• Coldwell Banker's Luxury Index - "luxury spending is resistant to interest rate hikes" [via MetaFilter]
  
• Magazines vs. Trade Papers vs. Journals - a typology of periodicals for the suprisingly large number of people who've asked me about them this week [from the WLU Library]

Over at AlterNet, Barbara Ehrenreich writes :

Where secular-type liberals and centrists go wrong is in categorizing religion as a form of "irrationality," akin to spirituality, sports mania and emotion generally. They fail to see that the current "Christianization" of red-state America bears no resemblance to the Great Revival of the early 19th century, an ecstatic movement that filled the fields of Virginia with the rolling, shrieking and jerking bodies of the revived. In contrast, today's right-leaning Christian churches represent a coldly Calvinist tradition...

What these churches have to offer, in addition to intangibles like eternal salvation, is concrete, material assistance. They have become an alternative welfare state, whose support rests not only on "faith" but also on the loyalty of the grateful recipients. [read more]

An apparently basic insight, but an important one. The right's arguments in favour of dismantling the welfare state or even taxation in favour of community social service groups and charity often are difficult to take seriously. To secular folk, it's clear that charity couldn't possible pick up the tab for welfare and other such programs.

On a regional or broader scale, of course, we're correct. But why do some refuse to accept this? Because they've seen charity work in their own lives (as donors, recipients, or both) on a much smaller scale; that is, at the level of the church congregation. Group solidarity is very high, you know everyone, and feel (correctly) that you have a stake in others' outcomes as well as your own. Wouldn't it be great entire nations felt the same kinship with one another? As Bush said in an address last year, why not unleash the armies of compassion?

The right is often knocked for being too pessimistic. This is a case of boundless - even dangerous - optimism. Augmenting the welfare state by encouraging smaller-scale, solidaristic social welfare supports is a great idea. Privlidging the latter over the former could cause serious problems. More on this later, once I've mulled it over a bit...

Europe v. America - a new cold war?

What was the contest between Bush and John Kerry, after all, if not a proxy war between pommes frites and freedom fries, a referendum on Europe conducted among the American electorate? Kerry, we were told, spoke French and "looked French." These gibes might have played as humor on Fox News, but they were in deadly earnest...

Kerry was an internationalist and a secularist (at least by American standards) running against a man who wrapped himself in the flag and was guided by divine inspiration. Bush didn't just run as an American; he pretty much ran as America, which Rifkin calls a nation "living in two seemingly contradictory realms at the same time," those being the evangelical Protestant faith in salvation and the rationalist drive to accumulate wealth and build industry. That cast Kerry in the role of Europe -- intellectual and irreligious, faintly stained by the ghosts of socialism and Catholicism, with a belief in universal human rights and negotiated solutions, but not much in the way of a transformative spiritual vision.

If "in the global conflict for moral and economic supremacy, Europe is winning," then I wonder to which pole is Canada more strongly attracted? [in Salon].

Fraser Institute anti-NDP, anti-Green, anti-PR

Yes, I know - shock, awe and wonder! From The Toronto Star :

The call for proportional system has the support of the NDP and the Green party because it would give them more seats and more leverage to get their policies enacted [read more]

Indeed. However, pitching PR as an evil power grab by the small parties is disingenuous. More importantly, it would give the Conservatives a substantial share of power in parliament (when Liberals hold the plurality); when Conservatives hold the plurality, PR would ensure the Liberals retain a meaningful say.

While we're on the subject of not-so-hidden agendas, let's be mindful of right-wing think tanks who would find themselves either marginalized or entirely obsolete once the prospect of (only) occasional FPTP-swollen Conservalliance hegemony -- disproportional, but 'legitimate' -- in the House of Commons fades out.

• Strongbad_email.exe to be unleashed on unsuspecting DVD-buying public - 3 discs, 100 emails [via bOINGbOING]
  
• The iXi bike, which is kinda cool, would be a helluva lot cooler if it weren't a thousand freaking dollars [via Consumer Whore]
  
• Brilliant, if vulgar: "Maybe us fucking Northerners don't talk about religion as much as you because we're not so busy sinning, hmmm? ...no, you're too busy erecting giant stone tablets of the Ten Commandments in buildings paid for by the fucking Northeast Liberal Elite." [via MeFi]

From The Boston Globe, via Kottke :

For all the Bible Belt talk about family values, it is the people from Kerry's home state, along with their neighbors in the Northeast corridor, who live these values. Indeed, it is the "blue" states, led by Massachusetts and Connecticut, that have been willing to invest more money over time to foster the reality of what it means to leave no children behind. [read more]

The article excerpted above, by a professor emeritus from Catholic University in D.C., takes divorce rates as an indicator of which geographic regions 'walk the walk' with respect to family values.

It's not totally fair, of course, to knock the South for simultaneously espousing and eschewing (in relative terms) marriage or, more precisely, 'non-divorce'. After all - and the piece does note this - the South ranks higher than the Northeast on most socioeconomic indicators linked to high divorce rates (more poverty than wealth, more protestant than Catholic). Still, as one example among many it is instructive... willingness to pay and allocate taxes to social services, if less easily measured, is another.

If only such arguments came from the mouths of centrist and left-leaning politicians more often. Those to the right are less shy about calling attention to perceived flaws in 'the other' (in this case, the much-maligned 'Massachusetts Liberal'). When's the last time you heard a Democrat openly questioning the commitment of Republicans to what are ostensibly their own core values? Instead of a direct approach, Democrats more often restrain themselves to re-affirming their own support of 'family values' in the face of Republican attacks.

Much better to reply with a pointed analysis of just how much respect the red-staters afford to, say, life. Yes, they oppose abortion and make it hard to obtain - yet they support the death penalty, and show little concern for the death of soldiers and civilians in military conflicts. Remember in the townhall-style debate when Bush mused about the moral minefield of "destroying life to save life" viz. stem cell research? If only Kerry had called him on the implications of such an approach viz. capital punishment and doctrinal justifications for pre-emptive war.

Home remedies for the morning after

• Electing to Leave: A reader’s guide to expatriating on November 3 [Harpers, via Wonkette]

4 more years, America. Nice going. I guess it's pretty much going to be "hair 'o the dog that bit you" for the national right-wing hangover. But I guess it's not my place to point and poke fun (or cry, or moan, or whatever).

Go out, but a folding cot from Canadian Tire, and welcome a U.S-ian refugee into your home. Hell, I've already got one living with me, and another lined up for my post-graduation life...

Ask MetaFilter is, as the kids say, the bomb. Case in pont: interesting question ("Why, when romanizing Arabic words and names, is the U-less Q used instead of K?"), informative answers ("Because the sound is produced further back in your throat [than] the K sound" & "The closest thing I can suggest, if you want to approximate this sound, is to drop your jaw, make an 'O' with your lips, and say the word 'cough'... you may manage to spit out something like the 'Q' [in] 'quran'") topped off with a healty does of thoughtful reflection on the assumptions of the questioner ("Also note that it isn't always a Q, since there are varying methods of Romanizing Arabic").

I wouldn't have thought it would be so satisfting to see other people's questions answered. It would be cool to make use of it to get my own questions answered, of course, but MeFi registration is perpetually closed. Grr.

Oh boy

I know this isn't news to any of you, but it's amazing what you'll miss if you only watch American and Canadian news. I could count on one hand the number of passages from the recent bin Laden tape that CNN, CBC, CBC Newsworld, CNN Headline News, the Toronto Star and the National Post actually bothered to translate into English. Enter Al Jazeera:

No one except a dumb thief plays with the security of others and then makes himself believe he will be secure. Whereas thinking people, when disaster strikes, make it their priority to look for its causes, in order to prevent it happening again.

But I am amazed at you. Even though we are in the fourth year after the events of September 11th, Bush is still engaged in distortion, deception and hiding from you the real causes. And thus, the reasons are still there for a repeat of what occurred.

I posted a few weeks ago about a passage from Gandhi that could just as easily have been from Marx or bin Laden. I submit that the bin Laden passage above could just as easily have been from Gandhi or the Dalai Lama.

Neither of the latter two would condone the actions or underlying position of the former, of course; still, the notion that one's adversary can be one's supreme teacher looms large. Only by honestly trying to understand why others are dissatisfied with our actions can understand them (both the others and our actions):

I couldn't forget those moving scenes [from Lebanon in 1982], blood and severed limbs, women and children sprawled everywhere. Houses destroyed along with their occupants and high rises demolished over their residents, rockets raining down on our home without mercy.

The situation was like a crocodile meeting a helpless child, powerless except for his screams. Does the crocodile understand a conversation that doesn't include a weapon? And the whole world saw and heard but it didn't respond... And as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children.

That he organized a response-in-kind is not excused on the grounds of the emotional response described above, but it is explained. I should hope that saying so won't get me put on the Canadian version of the no-fly list -- and if it did, that would be hilarious. Imagine them stopping everyone with my last name? Actually, I hope they do; I'd about time that folks with WASP names (Smith, Watts, Jones) were just as likely to be held up for no good reason as those with Middle Eastern ones.

Happy voting, neighbours -- choose wisely.

• CNN's America Votes 2004 Election Results Page for those of you who want to get tomorrow night's bookmarks settled early [via MeFi]

Kant, v4.52 (beta)

For a course in comparative religious ethics, I've stumbled onto the philosophical writings of Hans Jonas. As Borat says, "I liiiiiike." Here's a quick overview:

Kant’s famous categorical imperative said: "Act so that you can will that the maxim of your action be made the principle of universal law." Continuing this line of argument, Jonas writes: "[At the time of Kant] there [was] no self-contradiction in the thought that humanity would once come to an end, therefore, also none in the thought that the happiness of present and proximate generations would be bought with the unhappiness or even non-existence of later ones."

Being a Jew struggling with the ramifications of the Holocaust, one of Jonas' concerns was developing an ethical imperative to guide human action in the technological age, which has brought undreampt-of desctrucive capability in the form of efficient methods of killing, nuclear weapons, etc. So:

... an imperative responding to the new type of human action and addressed to the new type of agency that operates it might run thus: ‘Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life’; or simply: ‘Do not compromise the conditions for an indefinite continuation of humanity on earth’; or, again turned positive: ‘In your present choices, include the future wholeness of Man among the objects of your will.’

I have a whole book of his writings to read for class, and I look forward to it immensely.

In order to fulfil [Jonas'] new "imperative of responsibility" a scientific futurology is required. An imaginative "heuristics of fear" must tell us what is possibly at stake and what we must beware of. The prophecy of doom must take priority over the prophecy of bliss. As mankind has no right to suicide, the existence of man must never be put on stake. Thus, mankind’s existence becomes the First Commandment of a new ethical order. [read more]