Bragging rights

I sold a photo to soul_diaspora. What with packing, and budget concerns, getting it done was a pain.

My printer was packed. My for the size she wanted, getting it framed (And shipped) was going to put it either out of budget, or; at best, break even for me. I like her, but losing money on selling a print is no way to be able to stay in the business of making of prints.

So commodorified (who has been acting as my agent in Ottawa) undertook to deal with the more difficult option. Removing the packing and shipping costs would mean we could get it printed at this wonderful (but pricey) printer in Ottawa (we wanted to use him for the show at Umi, but there was no way to justify the couple of hundred extra it would have cost to get the prints done).

Pricing for matting/framing ought to be no more, so; for a slight discount, I could afford to make it work.

Well, things are never quite that simple. The cost of frames isn't trivial, and so instead of being able to get it made to order we had to go with matting to a pre-made frame for size. commodorified was having six kinds of wibble about getting the matting done (because she'd seen me at the framers, going back and forth between colors. I like to use a pair of complementary mattes. If I do it right the subtleties of the image are more plain. For really stark images, or for Black and Whites, a plain white, or black, can be enough, but I, personally, don't like that for color).

Well, it was delivered, and soul_diaspora is pleased.

(n.b., for those who like pictures of birds, and animals, she does some good work)

Travel

Feh.

They say it broadens the mind. Well, in that I read Persuasion for the first time (for some reason Austen had failed to grab me whenever I previously attempted her. I confess this with the sense of some moral failing), and enjoyed it a great deal, it may be.

But, for all the freedom of my having a Space-A ticket (which means it's completely reschedulable, with no penalties), gave me, the trip was an adventure.

My flight wouldn't come up on the kiosk. It was some work to get it to come up when the clerk went looking for it, and the pricing was hidden from her. It cost a bit mroe than quoted, but I didn't have to pay bag fees, so it was less than I was expecting.

Then the security fiasco. Oy!. They have a single screener scanning a pair of monitors (which are above eye level), and that controls the flow of people through the metal detector (they want you to be somewhere near your bags, so they can call out the bags they want to go through again).

Not only does this slow things down, it's a recipe for bag theft; because the metal detector can't keep up with the flow of bags. Happily this was the only security I had to clear. I got to the counter, and the flight looked good (Space-A is a form of standby flying). It looked good to Phoenix, after that sort of dicey.

The flight to Charlotte was overbooked. Which meant I might be at Sky-Harbor for 6-12 hours, waiting for a seat. By, Phoenix is a USAirways hub, so the odds of making an alternate flight plan were better. Off I go, into the wild blue yonder.

Get to Phoenix. Gate B-11 is my connection. I have about 40 minutes (because we were late out of LA). No, my connection is now B-28... some distance across the airport. I go, and check in. The area is jammed. The clerk tells me she might have a seat, just standby. I wait. I hear a lot of people asking about Minneapolis. That flight was moved to Gate B-11.

I am so glad I am not in Logistics. The arcana of keeping things something close to moving smoothly is headache inducing.

They get everyone on. There seem to be a couple of through passengers (who got off another flight), who've not shown up. Apperently they go lost in the fleshpots of Phoenix. I get to move on to Charlotte.

At Charlotte it's rush (because we were late out the gate from Phoenix too), and onto a small bird for Knoxville, where my sister was waiting, but my luggage wasn't. It's supposed to arrive here in an hour or so.

How did they miss this?

Remember those torture memos.... the ones which said waterboarding wasn't torture?

The ones which the "brilliant" legal minds of Jay Bybee, John Yoo, and Steven Bradbury, wrote?

Seems those brilliant legal minds missed some precedent. Not the war crimes trials of WW2, but a bunch of stuff in the US, some of it going back to the turn of the 20th Century.

Then again, the folks who wrote those memos seem to have a strange idea of "research", "You have informed us that this procedure does not inflict actual physical harm. Thus, although the subject may experience the fear or panic associated with the feeling of drowning, the waterboard does not inflict physical pain.

Got that. The client told the lawyer something and that declaration is the becomes the answer. It's begging the question.

Most of the memos were tortured bits of reasoning, meant to circumvent the Convention Against Torture, and the War Crimes Act of 1998, which Bybee said, you should be aware that there are no cases construing this statute, just as there have been no prosecutions brought under it...

Which seems to be true, in the finest of legalistic meanings of true.

It's not that waterboarding had no cases showing that the law sees it as torture, it's that no cases were brought under that specific law, but people... law enforcement people, have been sent to prison for waterboarding people, as recently as 1983.

A San Jacinto County Sheriff, Joe Parker set up a "marijuana trap", and subjected prisoners to "the water treatment."

“A towel was draped over his head,” Magee said, according to court documents. “He was pulled back in the chair and water was poured over the towel.”

There is, as you may expect, more.

One of the defendants, Deputy Floyd Allen Baker, said during the trial that he thought torture to be an immoral act but he was unaware that it was illegal. His attorneys cited the “Nuremberg defense,” that Baker was acting on orders from his superiors when he subjected prisoners to waterboarding.

Sound familiar? "We can't prosecute these people because they did it on the understanding it was legal." Which is exactly what Baker said... he thought it was immoral, but didn't know it was illegal.

The sheriff got ten years, the deputies got four.

So Bybee, Yoo, and Bradbury, decided to ignore this, and to craft a sentence which made it possible to argue (one might go so far as to say pretend), that waterboarding wasn't considered a crime in the US. They could have cited Teddy Roosevelt, who was protesting a court-martial of an officer who used, "the water cure" in the Phillipines. In a private letter he wrote, "The enlisted men began to use the old Filipino method: the water cure. Nobody was seriously damaged."

But, of course to do that they'd have to point out the court-martial saying, the officer (who was suspended, and fined, but not cashiered) had "resort[ed] to torture with a view to extort a confession." Adding that "the United States cannot afford to sanction the addition of torture."

As well it might come out that Teddy went on to order a general court martialed for abuses in the Phillipines, and when the court gave him a pass (citing him only for acting with excessive zeal), Teddy used "The Big Stick" and dismissed him.

None of that, of course, mattered. They had a charge to fill (giving the Bush administration legalistic cover for what they wanted to do), and like any good shyster they told the client what he wanted to hear, not what the law was most likely to decide.

The only way to rationalise it is to think they really believed Yoo's cockamamie theory of the "unitary executive" who has no restrictions if he declares a war (which is his right.... Congress merely has the privilege of formalising it).

Which I don't believe they do, because they went to all the work to write those memos... again, and again, and again.

The guilty flee, when no man pursueth. Let us then give them reason for their flight.