|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Metadata
| Ben A. |
Ben H. |
Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable |
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
 |
|
Happy 4th
Like all other good citizens, today we are celebrating our dominion over the cows by grinding and charring their flesh on a massive scale. And like the best citizens, we're doing so in a "pro-America" part of the country, northern Michigan. On the way up from the Detroit airport we got drive-thru from McDonalds, as a sort of preparation. I'm going to recommend the new 1/3 pound Angus burger with mushrooms and swiss. Aside from excessive salt, damn good. Not much else to report aside from top-notch family fun. Well, there was one odd thing to report at the Detroit airport. All the signs are translated into Japanese for reasons that are doubtless auto-industry-related. The odd thing wasn't that (I assume these reasons are valid) but the inexplicably awkward English words in the signage. The fountain in the center of the terminal is called a "water feature". The chapel is called a "religious reflection" center. Huh?
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 7/4/09 18:28] |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
| |
|
|
Extreme Diplomatic Formalism
It's been interesting to watch the international response to the removal of Honduras' president. The other members of the OAS, including the U.S., quickly characterized the army's expulsion of Zelaya as a "military coup." The situation seems a good deal more complicated than that brusque pejorative would imply. Zelaya aimed to wangle for himself a shot at a constitutionally prohibited second term*. In so doing, he defied the Congress and the Supreme Court, and counted on Venezuelan support to arrange a "consultative referendum", decried and boycotted by a wide range of Honduras' political spectrum (including Zelaya's own party). Zelaya ordered fired the head of the army, again in violation of the constitution. The Supreme Court ordered Zelaya's arrest; the army acted upon the Supreme Court's instruction, and installed in his place the constitutionally mandated successor. That successor happens to come from Zelaya's own party and quickly confirmed that November's presidential election would go ahead as scheduled. He himself would not stand as a candidate.
So why the rush? It feels like the countries of the OAS have come to apply a very formalistic legal paradigm to questions of international relations. It's a paradigm that fetishizes democracy and the concept of the "elected leader." SO many of the pronouncements on Honduras begin and end with calling Zelaya the "elected leader" of Honduras. With the exception of Cuba, the Western hemisphere doesn't have leaders who can't credibly boast of having been elected. Unfortunately, a significant minority of these leaders have, once elected, transformed themselves into liberty-squashing autocrats. Think of Hugo Chavez's gradual dismantling of Venezuela's constitutional regime by way of legal manipulation and unfair referenda; Daniel Ortega's corrupt bargains; Evo Morales whipped-up mob attacks on opposition strongholds. Zelaya, as far as I can see, was working from the Chavez playbook. For these characters, the formalist paradigm serves as a powerful shield against outside criticism or pressure. For the other countries of the OAS, a praiseworthy devotion to the rule of law may render them too reticent in the face of injustice under the cover of "democracy." It's particularly disappointing that the U.S. has responded so reflexively. Perhaps the Obama administration believes that, despite its vaunted international popularity, it has not yet been able to restore U.S. credibility to the point that he can argue facts against form. Or maybe he's a more accomplished practioner of realpolitik than his critics imagine: he throws Honduras' Congress, Supreme Court and majority of citizens under the bus in order to confound Chavez and his friends, who started to shriek about "The Empire's" helping to depose an "elected leader" in Central America, only to find "The Empire" demanding the restoration of that leader, too.
Still... I wonder if the members of the OAS would be so formalistic if the deposed crackpot were a man of the right!
*Article 239 of the Honduran Constitution:
El ciudadano que haya desempenado la titularidad del Poder Ejecutivo no podra ser President o Vicepresidente de la Republic. El que quebrante esta disposicion o proponga su reforma, asi come aquellos que lo apoyen directa o indirectamente, cesarean de inmediato en el desempeno de sus respectivos cargos y quedaran inhabilitados por diez (10) anos par el ejercicio de toda function publica.
A citizen who has held the leadership of the Executive Power shall not be able to be President or Vice-Prsident of the Republic. Whoever contravenes this regulation or proposes its reform, as well as those who support him directly or indirectly, shall desist immediately from the performane of their respective offices and shall remain banned for 10 years from the exercise of any public function.
Now, the second part of this article sounds a little strange to developed-country ears, but it stands as law nonetheless. Zelaya flagrantly violated it and suffered the consequences. What's more, the fact that such a draconian provision found its way into the constitution tells you how uncomfortable the Honduran people are with the threat of a slide into autocracy.
[Ben H.: 7/1/09 18:13] |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Legal One-upmanship
Everything you buy at the supermarket these days says "WARNING: made in an environment containing peanuts, almonds, milk, soy, gluten, and shellfish", thanks, no doubt, to our friends in the legal profession. I'm going to photograph my daughter next time she gets some mosquito bites and file the following lawsuit: "She is dangerously allergic to peanuts except when combined with shellfish -- and contrary to its label, this Snickers bar contains no shellfish!"
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 7/1/09 11:24] |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Supermajority
Now that Franken has give Democrats a Senate supermajority, will they please show some legislative courage? Like laying waste to all "stakeholders" in the current health care system?
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 6/30/09 22:28] |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
The Best Dish In Human History?
For dinner Dao and I made what must be one of the best dishes in human history. A French dish known as "tartiflette". It's not haute cuisine, not even cuisine bourgeoise -- you won't see it in Mastering The Art Of French Cooking. It's a regional peasant dish, one that appears outside its native Savoy most often in booths at weekend fairs. Sort of a Gallic corn dog. Except that, rather than being disgusting, it is divine. Success here depends more on ingredients than skill. The basic competence in French cooking that I've developed over the years doesn't really even come into play; the dish just requires boiling potatoes and frying bacon with onions. That, and a wheel of perfect reblochon cheese. It was Dao's delivery of such a wheel from Annecy that prompted us to make the tartiflette. Reblochon, if you don't know, if a pungent cheese whose distinctive taste is explained by its milk being produced exclusively in the evening, at the cows' second milking. Where did that word come from? Glad you asked.
... dérivé d'un verbe reblyochi. Ce verbe exprime l'action de faire sortir par une nouvelle pincée le lait qui se trouve encore dans le pis [itself a beguiling word! -- GtI] après la traite, le fromage étant à l'origine fait avec le lait de la seconde traite; il signifie aussi «faire pour la seconde fois». C'est le dérivé en re- du verbe dialectal blossi, bloc'hi, blocher «pincer», répandu en Suisse et en Savoie, que l'on ramène à un latin populaire blottaire d'origine inconnue. [Alain Rey, Le Robert Historique]
Etymology aside, reblochon's flavor is deep, nutty, earthy, musky. At least when you have a decent specimen! I tried an exorbitant one from Zabar's that could plausibly have come from a Kraft factory. No, a properly aged one is not something that the FDA would smile on. Earthy and musky -- let's dispense with the euphemisms, it's like sweaty genitals. Black truffles too have this sweaty-genitals quality, but cost twenty times more. Is that not the crowning glory of France? To have made the olfactory qualities of sweaty genitals into something noble, something sovereign? Yes it is! Step aside, Racine! Step aside, Monet! Et vive la France!
A colleague said today that the natural accompaniment for dishes like this is lots and lots of white wine, an assertion that this post, I fear, will do little to gainsay.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 6/29/09 20:54] |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Among The VC
I can't recall clearly what I intended to say about the wedding we went to last weekend in Chicago. The scheduled events that comprised it were commendably comme il faut. The venues were lovely, the meals convivial; the bride wore white, and a wayward but cute toddler dashed up the aisle and nearly disrupted the vows. (Yes, our toddler.) I had no expectation that the events would be extraordinary since the "real" wedding had actually taken place some six months earlier in Vietnam. This was a make-up for American friends and family who hadn't been able to go. The reason we went was that the groom is extraordinary. He is easily among my favorite people on earth. We met him in Vietnam during our truncated trip there six years ago. Somebody, I can't remember who, said we should meet him there; the ultimate connection was probably Harvard, from which he graduated a year after us. (He's Vietnamese in the way Dao is, i.e. he was born there but moved to the states as an infant when the communists took over the South.) So we met him at a restaurant he co-owned, on one of our first nights in Hanoi. Call him Nguyen -- it is, after all, his family name. (Feel free to look him up in the phone book.) Nguyen immediately struck me as friendly, guileless, warm. He had none of the grating traits I associate with businessmen, which I hardly need to enumerate here. He displayed enough intelligence in conversation that you could imagine him successfully affecting these traits if business required it. Or no, affecting isn't the right word -- put "manifesting". If business required him to be arrogant or intransigent, I bet he would do so naturally, for the duration of the meeting or the conference call. Then he would revert to warm and guileless. It's this easy and uncomplicated access to businessman-behavior that makes him the perfect 21st-century man. Now, Ben and Ben, don't begrudge me my bestowal of this accolade on someone else! You guys may well be just as successful as Nguyen, and I love you like brothers, but you have a capacity for ironic distance from your own lives that prevents you from enjoying twenty-first-century life to its 100% fullest. Nguyen is too engaged in the modernization-via-venture-capital of his homeland (and now, I assume, in married life) for such a capacity to even come into play. And let me say more about how we became friends with him. As you know, I came down with a bizarre joint ailment soon after coming to Hanoi. Nguyen, who has an M.D. as well as a J.D. and/or M.B.A., procured medicine for me, and brought food to me when I was immobilized in my fifth-floor walk-up and Dao had returned to Paris for a bureaucratic appointment. He is a great guy. (If it seems like I have a kind of bromantic male crush on him, you haven't quite understood: I want to be him; compare Ben Folds' refrain about his beloved "Kate" in the eponymous song: "I wanna, wanna, wanna, wanna be Kate.") My friend J-S in Paris is fond of saying that his true calling is to be a professor of Larry David studies, so profound is his admiration of the Seinfeld producer; well, I should probably be a professor of Nguyen studies. The reception was not a perfect revel for me, however. Dao went back to the hotel room early with the kid. I didn't know anyone except Nguyen and his business partner. Most of the people at the wedding seemed to be in venture capital, like Nguyen, so it required a lot of effort for me to strike up a rapport with them, seeing as I'm an awkward mathematician type. ("So, how's .... money?") One datum of interest to me came from Nguyen's brother-in-law, a white guy who does venture capital in Vietnam. Apparently he came down with a grave joint ailment in 2004 while in Vietnam, which took a long time to go away. I can only assume it's the same thing I got. I should really follow up with him and compare notes. Anyway, he still goes back to Vietnam on business and hasn't had any serious relapses, so maybe we could go back to visit sometime. I'd love to hang out with Nguyen again, and get to know his wife, who I only talked to briefly at the wedding. At the risk of narrowing down Nguyen's identity I will say that his wife is the Prime Minister's daughter. She seems quite dynamic herself. She's in VC.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 6/28/09 03:01] |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Proposal For New Bandarlog Catch-Phrase
Vortical, which I learned is actually a word by playing it in online Scrabble. It means what it sounds like, vortex-like. Let's try to work it in to as many posts as possible.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 6/27/09 19:10] |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Red State One-Upmanship
By now you've heard of the Kentucky pastor who organized an "open carry celebration" at his church, where the faithful were encouraged to bring handguns. I think if I myself were trying to find a niche as a Kentucky pastor, my open carry day would involve guns and open containers of bourbon.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 6/27/09 18:37] |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
My co-worker ate two whole Carnegie Deli pastrami sandwiches for lunch the other day. This is remarkable only if you've seen their sandwiches. Unfortunately I have only the "after" picture.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 6/23/09 15:37] |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Urkel Shrugged
A message I got just now, from the mailing list of University of Paris mathematical logic center I used to belong to, begins thus: Chers tous, L'equipe de Logique est toujours en lutte - comme l'est toute la communaute des mathematiciens et informaticiens. "Dear all, the Logic group is continuing its struggle [i.e. still on strike after any months], as is the entire mathematical and informatics community ..."
Stick it to the man!
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 6/23/09 11:55] |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Our health laws are like those Chinese finger locks where the more you try to pull them off, the tighter they get, and all ten of our fingers are locked together in a diabolical knot. In the one case as in the other, the only solution is a blow-torch, third-degree burns be damned.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 6/23/09 10:01] |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
The important thing, Doug, is that the legislators who passed the bill were trying to help.
[Ben H.: 6/23/09 06:09] |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Health Insurance Fun
A friend who does lawyerly work for a state government sent me the following message, which I thought I'd share.
As part of the February 2009 stimulus, a new COBRA subsidy benefit was created, which cuts the premium costs by 65 percent for people involuntarily terminated between September 1, 2008 and the end of this year. Rolling this out was a royal pain in the ass. First, we had to identify all the people going back six months who were eligible for COBRA at all and send them amended notices. This included notices to several hundred people known to be ineligible for the subsidy (their qualifying event was a death, divorce, graduation, etc.), which then allowed us the chance to explain why we weren't giving their Matthew-Lesko-approved free government money. Then, we have to analyze a lot of claims to figure out if they meet the non-defined criteria for an involuntary termination. Usually, it means that the employer pulled the trigger, but in the months after February, the IRS and DOL came out with guidance creating all sorts of exceptions, where a retirement or resignation can become a constructive termination. Of course, we only were given 60 days to roll this stupid thing out and this guidance was still coming out with a week or two to go. Our favorite discovery this month has been that if you are laid off while on an FMLA leave you get the subsidy, but if you were on a regular unpaid non-FMLA medical leave of absence you do not. It is really fun explaining to understanding widows how they don't get it, but their deceased husband's cubicle neighbor who got fired after months of time and attendance problems gets it. The best part is that when we deny these people, the feds (DHHS) have still not set up their appeals process and only list a phone number and e-mail (for a third-party consultant firm naturally) to take inquiries.
So, anyway, last week we got a call from a benefits consultant firm with the proper papers to inquire about a patient for the hospital that it represents. The consultants were getting quotes for how much it would cost to reactivate this guy's COBRA coverage under the retroactive election reconsideration provisions of the subsidy benefit and to confirm that he could still get the discount with them cutting the checks. So, the hospital is going to probably end up buying insurance retroactively for this guy for three weeks and then he will drop, but not after we get to pay the hospital a healthy multiplier on their investment. And it has only taken two months from enactment for this type of wonderful gamesmanship to bubble up. I have no solutions
to offer, but will predict that the Scooter-Storization of American health care will never be stopped.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 6/23/09 00:06] |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Ben A. |
Ben H. |
Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable |
Earlier |