Carnival Day

Carnival today in the Mission. Billed as 'colors of sound, splashes of culture', with a holistic, Earth friendly whatever, it's really the day when scantily clad ladies (or men, depending on your viewpoint) do the shimmy-shake in public. (CARN-ival pace: your Latin dictionary) For whatever reason, Telemundo, the Spanish end of NBC, isn't broadcasting it this year, but I'm sure a few clips will be on the net. As is always the case, the professional contingents, floats and food vendors are decked to the nines, but the real stars are the kids that have been practicing all year and the Church ladies who bring out the secret family recipes to share. The Pac Bell floats and the Bay Guardian pat ourselves on the back-a-thon just can't match the real deal. I know I've become something of a broken record with the local vs. corporate schtick, but there was a time when it was literally a family, Church, local school, and bands from the neighborhood celebration. (i.e. they weren't trying to sell you a phone plan, stock deal or political persuasion) On the other hand, they did keep the scantily clad dancers. It's the future, what can you do?

The first part of today's link-dump relates to our legal system:

• The Scourge of Juristocracy: The United States may not be the world’s indispensable nation, as its secretary of state famously claimed a dozen years ago, but it has certainly been the indispensable inspiration in the global spread of democracy. The irony is that while this has not led to a great deal of imitation of American institutions such as the presidency, the single most widely replicated feature of the American political system is also its most undemocratic one.
• Scalia - Don't bother me with details: This court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent. Quite to the contrary, we have repeatedly left that question unresolved, while expressing considerable doubt that any claim based on alleged ‘actual innocence’ is constitutionally cognizable.
• Pot Raid: When the government has the right to bust into tens of thousands of homes in the middle of the night, unannounced, with guns drawn and in full military armor, to take the life of beloved family members, and to menace 6-year old children, all because the homeowner is believed to possess a few grams of a plant or a non-explosive substance, tyranny cannot be said to be on the way. It’s already here.
• The Tea Party Jacobins: Many Americans, a vocal and varied segment of the public at large, have now convinced themselves that educated elites—politicians, bureaucrats, reporters, but also doctors, scientists, even schoolteachers—are controlling our lives. And they want them to stop. They say they are tired of being told what counts as news or what they should think about global warming; tired of being told what their children should be taught, how much of their paychecks they get to keep, whether to insure themselves, which medicines they can have, where they can build their homes, which guns they can buy, when they have to wear seatbelts and helmets, whether they can talk on the phone while driving, which foods they can eat, how much soda they can drink…the list is long.

Next, a bit of science, with its attendant culture clash. Plus a bit of civil war history your inner steampunk might enjoy.

• Ever since Steven Spielberg's 2002 sci-fi movie Minority Report, in which a black-clad Tom Cruise stands in front of a transparent screen manipulating a host of video images simply by waving his hands, the idea of gesture-based computer interfaces has captured the imagination of technophiles.
• Science Daily (May 21, 2010) — The hottest known planet in the Milky Way galaxy may also be its shortest-lived world. The doomed planet is being eaten by its parent star, according to observations made by a new instrument on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS).
• Via: Bruce Sterling, one of the more obvious augmented reality applications, done elegantly: historical archive images overlaid onto the real. The older I get, the more I become fascinated with history; if someone did up layers like this for the whole country, I’d probably never switch it off.
• Air War over Virginia: On April 20, 1861, just eight days after South Carolina secessionists fired the first shots on Fort Sumter, an enormous apparition descended gently upon a sparsely populated village nine miles west of Unionville, South Carolina. A cautious, well-armed group of men carefully ventured out to the open field where the 50-foot-high monstrosity had landed, fully expecting to meet the devil himself.

And last, things that don't quite fit into an easy slot.

• America’s Changeable Civil War: As the Civil War Sesquicentennial approaches cruising speed, North and South look a great deal more alike than they did on the eve of the war’s last great anniversary just 50 years ago. That much-heralded celebration coincided with the rise of the civil rights movement with a precision that was almost too good to be true.
• Joe Bageant: It goes without saying there are many occasions when I have been obnoxious, bullet proof drunk. I'd say that calling the city councilman's wife a "money loving power slut," and a "shit-for-brains Republican hose beast" is some barometer of obnoxiousness, if not bullet-proofness. Hypertension, COPD and diabetes eventually fixed that problem.
• Charles Tan: The latest of Charles’ projects is the Best of Philippine Speculative Fiction 2009 anthology, whose title is probably self-explanatory and which follows on from 2008's Philippine Speculative Fiction sampler. All the stories are free to read online, and downloadable as PDF or EPUB files...… so bang goes your accessibility excuse for not reading any non-Western spec fic, eh?
• Saviors & Sovereigns: The Rise and Fall of Humanitarianism But after the Berlin Wall came down, freedom’s crusaders increasingly set their eyes not so much on Communism as on violators of human rights in general. They unfurled the banner of humanitarianism and, righteously, scorned the cowards and skeptics who wanted to keep America’s powder dry.