Author: Josh Philip Ross

Posted on

[blame sweden]

Topic: Politics

According to Slate’s reading of Bob Woodward’s latest political gossip-fest, Plan of Attack:

Karl Rove, a Norwegian-American, is obsessed with the “historical duplicity” of the Swedes, who seized Norway back in 1814. This nationalism manifests itself as hatred for Swedish weapons inspector Hans Blix.

So if you were wondering why our intelligence was such a mess, now you know: blame Sweden.

And come to think of it, wasn’t Hans Blix not only entirely right but entirely successful at ridding Iraq of WMDs via the inspections regime? Because they didn’t have any, actually, so I guess all that heavily disparaged Clintonian sanctions-and-swatting-flies stuff was in fact wholly effective. Boy, I’m glad we traded in those policies for our Glorious Liberation!

Posted on

[doobieous theories]

Topic: Culture

Today is April 20, popularly known as 420. If you’ve ever wondered why the number 420 is associated with marijuana, Phish.Net FAQ has answers. Unfortunately, they have too many answers, which is not much better than none at all, at least epistemologically. Nevertheless, what better way to celebrate 420 than with piles of ludicrous, contradictory hypotheses?

And yes, I have my own theory to add. The Phish site mentions Salman Rushdie’s reference to 420 as a number of chaos and trickery. In Hindu mythology, Shiva is the god of chaos (or destruction). He is also an inveterate dopehead who whiles away the millenia getting high atop Mount Kailash and engaging in cosmic nookie with his consort Parvati. So my crackpot (emphasis on the latter syllable) theory is that 420 became associated with the ascetic followers of Shiva, who wander India in loincloths and matted dreadlocks, smoking marijuana chillams, increasing the average holiness of the population, and making respectable folk just a tad nervous.

Whatever your theory, have a happy 420.

Posted on

[palaverist is back]

Topic: Personal

After a splendid week in California, I’m back again in New York, which switched from drizzly, crappy early spring to hot and sunny early summer in my absence. The ginko leaves are peeking out, as are the occasional bare legs beneath a short skirt. Ah, summer!

In this new season, I may have to scale back a bit for work-related reasons — i.e., I need to actually do some — but I’ll try to get out a couple of good posts each week. So keep checking in!

Posted on

[living like scandinavians]

Topic: Personal
It’s that time of year again: Daylight Saving Time! Personally, though I dislike losing an hour of my weekend and getting up an hour early, I love what Daylight Saving Time actually does for us. It may be a bizarre legislative hangover from a bygone era, but it gives us long summer evenings. And I love long summer evenings. I like to get out of work when the sun is still up and go walking for an hour or three through Manhattan, exploring the city in the extended evening glow. The end of Standard Time means the end of the Dark Months, even more than those first little leaves or a daffodil peeking through the soil. Summer is on its way.

DST also makes the time difference between sunset in December and sunset in June that much more extreme, so we can all feel just a little bit more like Scandinavians. And that’s pretty cool too.

Posted on

[retracting the retraction]

Topic: Politics

As far as political crises go, a yawning kid at a Bush speech shouldn’t be a major one. CNN reported, though, that the White House was claiming the video was faked or manipulated, but then CNN backed off that claim.

I bought CNN’s line, but it has been pointed out to me that this is standard operating procedure for both the White House and CNN: the former likes to put out attacking rumors anonymously and see if they fly, then deny responsibility — revealing Valerie Plame as a CIA operative, suggesting Richard Clarke is gay or hearing voices, etc. And CNN, perhaps out of some desperation for the crumbs of access it thinks it needs to compete with Fox, folded the instant the White House told it to. Which is why we don’t watch CNN.

Paul Krugman has a bit more on the matter in the New York Times [via Talking Points Memo].

Posted on

[psychedelic drought]

Topic: Culture
Have you noticed how very unpsychedelic our current cultural moment is? As were the ’80s that we’re so tediously rehashing, this is an era of cocaine and Republicanism. Indeed, our whole society seems to be living in a cocaine cycle: blasts of grandiosity interspersed with hollow periods of baseless paranoia.

It turns out that the demand for psychedelics hasn’t dropped, but that the supply of acid has dried up. I know that as a good citizen I’m supposed to be happy about that, but I’m not. Psychedelic drugs have a way of knocking down dogmatism: how certain can you be about anything when you know your whole world view depends on the presence or absence of 30 micrograms of a particular chemical in your brain? (The moral effect of a strong psychedelic is a lot like that of traveling to a very strange country, which explains why they call it a trip.)

I like psychedelia. Whether it’s John Lennon pretending to be a walrus, Kurt Cobain standing too close to his amplifier, or Samuel Taylor Coleridge dreaming of the Khan’s pleasure dome, the exploratory, multilayered, richly hued aesthetic appeals to me. And I believe it does something positive for the culture at large.

Ah, well. It’s from played-out times like these — the late ’50s, the late ’80s, the Restoration — that something new rises. I just hope it’s noisy and weird.

Posted on

[a yawning confusion]

Topic: Politics

Wonkette has an update on the Story of the Boy who Yawned. The video wasn’t faked, but apparently the White House response was: CNN now claims the Bushies never said word one about the affair. So my apologies to the White House for buying into the story.

And this is yet one more reason to stop taking CNN seriously. I gave up on CNN back at the start of the Iraq war, when even FOX News was taking a critical look at the slowing advance, but all CNN could talk about was the nonstory of Jessica Lynch, which had some compelling human interest and about zero political or military importance. And anyway, BBC World kicks both their asses. And has anchor Mishal Hussein, who is so dreamy. If I had a locker, her picture would be pasted to the inside of the door.