Seven years

Remember that seven years ago it seemed that the Milošević regime had ended with the participation of, among other things, a fellow with a bulldozer? You could be forgiven if you did not. The fellow with the bulldozer is selling it, for 90.000 Euros. And why not? People have sold the legacy of 5 October for less.

Irony, anyone? The person who was minister of information for Milošević in 1996 and 1997 is now the director of RTS, where the famous bulldozer was directed in its day. But you knew that.

Sveti Džimi ubija aždahu

If the Serbian government is really taking advice from this fellow, expect brinksmanship, extremism and provocation. If their goal is to vanquish dark heathens, as well as pagans, apostates and impostors, though, this should be their guy.

Home office follies: They never end!

Hey, remember those documents and that letter the good folks in Sheffield wanted me to wait twelve weeks to receive back? Here I get this message from them that says:

Dear Applicant

Your letter and original documents have been returned to us undelivered.
We are having trouble sending these out to you as the package is so big.

Would it be possible for you to arrange a courier to collect these? We will hold them here until we receive a response from you.

Kind Regards
[name mercifully redacted by me]
HSMP Team

All right now, from the top: 1) my name is not "Applicant," 2) if you did not have a clue what to do with documents that you requested, such as the original certificates for my degrees, why did you ask for them?, 3) are you aware of the trust that is placed in you when people send valuable personal documents, and what is implied by your cavalier attitude toward that trust?, 4) is there special training a person can undergo to achieve a level of incompetence so monumental?

For your notational crudite, and not for your sheep

Okay, fine, I am all for government agencies doing what they can to communicate with the public. While the US State Department is not as shrouded in secrecy as some other agencies, including private companies that make US foreign policies with no disclosure or oversight at all, a start is a start. And a bad start is a bad one. Shall we begin with the name? Dipnote is presumably meant to convey something like "note about diplomacy." State Department, will you trust me if I tell you that it does not come off with that connotation? As for the content, well, they have only begun, but it does not say much and about what it says there is not much to be said.

Having said all that, offering information at all is probably a step in the right direction. Offering timely and useful information with a degree of interactivity and pointers to additional information would be a bigger step. Real dialogue and openness would be too much to hope for, and then the source providing it would be a different source altogether.

Of NATO-states and quasistates

My friends at Open Democracy asked me to comment on the froth around the Kosovo negotiations, so I wrote a little something.

Headline of the week

From Politika:

Како ће Срби прихватити ПМС

It's actually an article about the prospects of a new political party. Which might want to think about a different name. If not, let's hope they will accept it about as well as anyone else.

Quote of the week

Tomislav Nikolić, Serbian Radical Party, quoted by B92: "'Serbia has to be divided between democrats and radicals,' citizens have to decide between two large parties, and 'there is no room for the existence of some third, with an unknown profile which will in the end decide which of those two parties will be in power'."

This came in an article about how Novi Sad mayor Maja Gojković has distanced herself from the party since taking office, but it does sound like Mr Nikolić is speaking in the general sense. Is it time for people to ask, finally, which side they are on?

Vi me ne razumete mladi gospodine / ja strašno volim vaše životinje

It is a while since this blog has memed, but we have been caught with one by everybody's favourite coturnician blogger Bora. He is asking for experiences with animals, so there is no way I could not comply without the help of my daughter. Azra's answers go first, followed by Eric's:

An interesting animal I had

A: Lajos, my cute little Schipperke.
He is always up to something. He is a little naughty. A dog may not be so interesting by “type of animal” standards, but by doggie standards he is very interesting.
He is also about as well travelled as any other dog around. He has been trans-Atlantic 8 times so far, and he’ll be continuing to go trans-Atlantic for quite a while. He has been driven across the USA. He has been to many countries in Europe. Pretty much everywhere I go, he goes with me.

E: We used to have a horse named Amigo. Although his name meant friend, in fact Amigo had kind of a mean sense of humour. When we would take visitors for a ride on the beach, whoever was riding Amigo would get the surprise of breaking away suddenly from the group, running out into the water, and getting thrown in. This was the only kind of nestašluk in which he ever indulged.

An interesting animal I ate

A: Ostrich. I had it in a goulash, and it tasted great! Ostrich goulash was my favorite food for quite a while.

E: I love the Bambi paprikaš at Lovac, and also at the Čuburska lipa restaurant which is operated by Josip Broz, who shares a name with his famous grandfather.

An interesting animal in a museum

A: In the Harvard Museum, there is this enormous turtle/tortoise (I’m not sure which) shell from a prehistoric turtle/tortoise. It’s big enough for an average person to climb in and move around comfortably (though they wouldn’t be able to stand up). I always love seeing it.

E: The monkey house at the Belgrade zoo is always a treat. Partly for the monkeys, which are always up to something sort of humanesque. But it is best when there are a lot of people there, who try to get the attention of the monkeys from the other side of the glass. It is not always possible to tell which animal is on display for which.

An interesting thing I did with or to an animal

A: I gave my dog a swimming lesson. We would go to the beach and drop him in the water. He would immediately doggie-paddle (ha-ha) towards the shore. We’d have to ambush him, and then he would go swimming around, sneezing in protest. Eventually, though, he learned to like it. I wish he’d known that from the beginning!

E: I don’t know why this question keeps giving me images of dissecting frogs and the like in high school biology. That job always disgusted me, everything from the implicit cruelty and pointlessness to the smell. Strangely, when I put herbed butter underneath the skin of a chicken, it doesn’t bother me a bit.

An interesting animal in its natural habitat

A: There’s a type of frog that lives in Australia that makes its nice cozy home in a toilet. I think that’s about as interesting a natural habitat as you can get! Before toilets were invented, they had to make do with murky swamps.

E: I don’t know how interesting they are, but they have a lot of charm and are nicely suited to the limits of their environment: prairie dogs!

The practice, I think, is to tag other bloggers with an instruction to respond. I think what I will do instead is just encourage people to respond if they feel so inspired.

Nenad Bogdanović, 1954-2007

Today the mayor of Belgrade, Nenad Bogdanović, died after a long illness. He was smart, modest, decent and energetic, and gave an idea of how political life might be different if every public official was engaged with their community and had the ambition to do the right thing. The first directly elected mayor of the city leaves it behind cleaner, better organised, and better connected with the world around it than it was before he started the job.

Credit where it is due

If anybody has been following my ongoing visa saga, note the difference here. The timeline of receiving entry clearance is as follows:

• Friday -- Receive HSMP visa approval letter; fill out online application for entry clearance, gather documents
• Saturday -- Ship off application, documents and passport to UK consulate in New York
• Monday -- Receive confirmation from Federal Express that materials have been delivered
• Tuesday -- Receive e-mail from consulate confirming that materials have been received and offering an estimate of how long the process takes
• Wednesday -- Receive e-mail from consulate notifying me that approval has been given, telling me that materials have been sent back to me, and giving a tracking number
• Thursday -- Receive passport with entry clearance and return of my documents

Reliable and swift information, no delays, no problems, no complaints. That is the way it is done. I'll bet they could learn to do that in Sheffield too.

Next up is to confirm travel plans and get those students in London taken care of.

Eats shoots and leaves

We have a ton of maslačak. If anyone has any tasty recipes for it to share, they will be ever so welcome in the comments. I already know that chopped up and mixed with tomato in a salad is just delightful.

Spoken but unmarched

The police in Novi Sad have decided, after all, not to permit the march that the local neo-Nazis had planned to mark, of all things, the birthday of Heinrich Himmler. But racist fools will still have a safe place to meet, regardless.

Addendum: Marko Jakšić is no relation to Duško Jakšić or Boža Jakšić, both of whom merit the highest admiration. And Goran Davidović does not want you to call him Führer, please.

Chlorine and anarchy

It would be a fun little tidbit for any cheeky chronicler of politics (for example, Wonkette) to note that the Kennebunkport Bushies are not adored by the fellow who maintains their swimming pool. Of East Ethnian interest may also be the fact that the same guy's brother made this fine documentary film about anarchists and other folks in Zagreb.

Less time on the sidewalk

Starting January, it will become a little bit easier for people who are not in power or under indictment to travel to EU countries from Albania, Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia. Every little bit.

News that's fit to click

It has been about a year, and now the NY Times has decided to abandon its experiment of charging for access to some items. No surprises there: experience has shown that web users are often happy to buy goods and services online, generally willing to tolerate advertising that is not too intrusive, but mostly resist paying for content. Considering that most of the content for which the Times was charging was opinion articles by their columnists, they were faced with the fact that there is plenty of material of better quality available for free.

Do novih pobjeda radničke klase

I have just been informed that the Home Office has reversed its previous decision and decided to issue me an HSMP visa. Next steps: applying for entry clearance, making travel plans, and getting my butt over to my fab new job. After that, I must learn to say things like "flat" and "cor."

Saab story

Anyone care to buy our car?

Make thee mightier yet

I do believe that I may have said in a previous post on my deepening relationship with the UK Home Office that their refusal of my visa application and my grounds for appeal are "too boring for any of the readers here." But did I prove that? I can, you know. Below is the text of the appeal letter I sent to my friends in the HSMP office in Sheffield, which will arrive to them by express courier on Monday (and has already arrived to some of them by e-mail).

14 September 2007

Highly Skilled Migrant Programme
PO Box 3468
Sheffield S3 8WA
UK

Re: Request for review of application [right, I'm going to give you my case number]

To the members of the HSMP team:

I am in receipt of your letter of 28 August 2007 informing me of the decision on my application for an HSMP visa [secret magic number]. I believe that the HSMP team has reached an incorrect decision based on misinterpretation of the documents provided, and am therefore requesting reconsideration of the application for the reasons set out below.

The decision was based on an interpretation of the documentation I provided under the section “Previous earnings.” Allow me to address the contentions made in your letter of 28 August individually:

1. The letter claims that "the evidence does not corroborate the wage slips." It is difficult to follow the logic of this contention, since the wage slips are evidence, and their function is to corroborate, not to be corroborated. The wage slips do establish that the income claimed was earned, and the letter does not claim otherwise. It is unclear what is meant by corroboration in this context, since there exists no other evidence of what is contained in the wage slips aside from the wage slips themselves, which were provided to your office in accordance with the guidance notes for application. They clearly set out the amount of my salary for each fourteen-day period covered by each wage slip, the amount deducted for state and federal taxes, payments into federal and private pension schemes, medical insurance, and the amount deposited into my bank account.

2. The letter claims that I "have not provided an original tax return that corroborates individual earnings for the full period claimed." Here again it is not possible to discern from the letter what the HSMP team found to object to regarding my tax return. The only basis I can use for response is the half sentence offered in the letter. What follows is my detailed response based on what the HSMP team’s conclusion might have been, as derived through an exegesis of the half sentence in the letter:

a) Is the tax return original? Our tax return was filed electronically, which is done by an increasing number of people in the United States as it accelerates the process, simplifies the procedure of filling out the famously complicated forms, and reduces the potential for error. This practice is explicitly encouraged by the Internal Revenue Service as a matter of policy. Since the entire process takes place through electronic transactions, there is no "original" paper document. Rather, when the procedure is completed, the software produces a PDF file with the completed return, one copy of which is sent electronically to the Internal Revenue Service for processing, and one copy of which is downloaded to our computer. If we had filed our taxes using paper documents, we would still not have the original document as this would have been sent to the Internal Revenue Service, and we would have saved a copy for ourselves, as is the normal procedure. The copy which taxpayers save for their files is accepted as evidence of income and taxes paid by every existing relevant institution, including banks, mortgage brokers, and the Internal Revenue Service itself.

b) Is the document a tax return? The document that was provided is what is called a “tax return” as defined by the US Internal Revenue Code, and is referred to as such by taxpayers, accountants, banks, other financial institutions, and the Internal Revenue Service itself. There exists no other type of document which is referred to universally as a “tax return.” Under the definition in the Guidance Notes for the HSMP application, the document provided is also a tax return. The obvious and unavoidable conclusion is that the document is a tax return.

c) Is the tax return individual? There are three options available to taxpayers filing returns in the United States: they may file an “individual” return, file as “married filing jointly,” or they may file as “married filing separately.” The option of filing an “individual” return is not available to taxpayers who are married. My wife and I filed a joint tax return. This is what is done by the overwhelming majority of married couples, particularly if they want to take advantage of joint tax deductions for charitable contributions or child allowances, or if they own property in common. As the status of “married filing separately” involves twice the paperwork, it is generally used by people in less common circumstances, such as married partners who have widely differing individual property holdings or individually owned income-producing assets. Our tax return was prepared in accordance with the US Internal Revenue Code as the most complete and succinct statement of our family income. It may be the case that we could have filed separately when reporting our 2006 income, but 1) at the time, I did not know that I would be accepting employment in the UK, and 2) even if I had, I would not have known about the Byzantine interpretive strategies employed by the UK Home Office. I do not believe that the UK Home Office has the authority to penalise US taxpayers for complying with US tax law.

In any case, I corroborated my individual earnings with two pieces of additional evidence: 1) my wage slips covering an entire twelve-month period in 2006 and 2007, and 2) the 2006-2007 and 2007-2008 "salary letters" which are sent to each member of the faculty by the president of Clark University (my employer since 1997) giving details of salary for the coming academic year.

d) Does the documentation cover the full period? I provided documentation of earnings over an academic year, which is how salaries are calculated by my employer. Income tax returns cover earnings over a calendar year. The guidance notes for the HSMP application do not specify that the periods covered by two types of documentation need to correspond exactly with one another. They request income documentation for 12 of the preceding 15 months, and they request the most recent available tax return. Since tax returns are filed in April of each year to declare income for the preceding calendar year, there is no possibility of providing that type of documentation for income earned during 2007. Since most of the period between January 2006 and December 2006 does not fall within the 15 months preceding the HSMP application, that evidence is not suitable for submission. Here the HSMP staff appears to have invented a rule which is not stated in the application instructions, and would contain fatal internal contradictions if it were. The contention in your letter of 28 August is arbitrary, and it contradicts the published guidance.

3. The letter claims that two of the supporting documents provided state "your expected salary and they do not state your actual salary for the period claimed." The two documents in question are letters from the President of Clark University, Dr John Bassett, informing me of my salary for the 2006-2007 and the 2007-2008 academic years. These letters are sent each year to each permanent member of the faculty at Clark University, as they are at nearly every other university in the United States. According to US employment law and the rules of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), these letters are legally binding documents with contractual status. As the president of the University, Dr Bassett is the highest ranking administrative officer of the institution, and under the university statute does not have the authority to discuss vague expectations in this type of communication (although he may do so in other contexts, such as addresses before a public audience).

For the reasons stated above, it is apparent to me that the HSMP team has misinterpreted the documentation which was submitted to them, has rejected documentation without valid reason, and consequently reached an incorrect conclusion in considering my case. I am therefore appealing the decision and requesting that the case be reconsidered.

Please permit me to remind you that my application was submitted with a request for urgent treatment, and that I request that my appeal also be treated urgently.


Thank you for considering my appeal.

Sincerely,

Dr Eric Gordy

Only hope (also, glory) stands between me and a positive decision. We shall see.

Make muster 'gainst the foreign hand that's raised to the Rose of England

The appeal of the Home Office's decision went off to them today. I will keep everyone posted on my long road to gastarbeiterlichkeit.

For the record, perhaps I should note that I am not a terrorist, have never committed a crime, and always clean up after my dog.

The triumph of bureaucracy over matter

Well, it took some doing, but I finally got from the Home office notification of the status of my visa application. It turns out I was refused (Jelenko, gdje si?), for reasons that I believe I will be able to contest. But let's get to the first step: how does one receive information about the disposition of his or her own case? It turns out that it can be done in several hairpulling steps:

1. Ask to be informed.
2. Fail to receive a reply.
3. Ask for intervention by the complaints unit.
4. Receive a bewildering variety of contradictory replies, some stating that the case has already been taken up, some stating that the case will be taken up in the future, and some stating that the case cannot be taken up.
5. Ask to be informed again.
6. Fail to receive a reply again (repeat two times).
7. Find the address of the head of the Border and Immigration Agency.
8. Ask her to intervene ("Hej ministre, jel mogu da dobijem jednu garažu za svoj bend?").
9. In the meantime, continue to receive correspondence telling you that it is impossible to be notified of the status of your case in less than twelve weeks "due to security reasons."
10. After a short interval, receive the document that they were obligated to supply in the first place, along with a note stating that informing applicants of the status of their cases in a timely manner "is not common practice and has been done on this occasion exceptionally."

The details of the matter and the grounds on which I will appeal are, I do not doubt, too boring for any of the readers here. But there is a nice little gem in the letter I finally did receive, which contains the passage:

You may request one reconsideration of your application. This will be carried out on the basis of exactly the same information provided in your original application. If you wish us to review our decision, you should clearly set out the reasons why you believe the decision is incorrect in a letter to the HSMP Team or complete the review request form available on our website: www.workingintheuk.gov.uk. This must be sent within 28 days of the date of the decision. Please note that any review requests received more than 28 days after the date of the decision will not normally be accepted and any verbal request for a review cannot be considered as valid.

Considering that I was able to be notified of the decision within 17 days only by virtue of the extraordinary intervention of a powerful individual, and that otherwise the Home Office seems to insist that twelve weeks is a reasonable amount of time in which to be notified of decisions, an interesting possibility arises. Since weeks, if they are calculated using base-10, generally last 7 days, and since 12 x 7 = 84, and since 84 - 28 = 56, it looks as though somebody has calculated a way to deprive every applicant of the right of appeal by design.

Quod erat zajebatum.