Peace of Shit

I first realized the Nobel Peace Prize was nothing more than a left-wing popularity contest in 1991, when the prize was awarded to the man who ended the Cold War and set Eastern Europe on its course to freedom and democracy.

No, stupid - not Ronald Reagan. We're talking about Mikhail Gorbachev.

Not quite three months after being awarded the Peace Prize, the peaceful Gorbachev sent Soviet tanks into Lithuania to crush a pro-democracy independence movement. The cries of outrage from The World Community™ was deafening. No, wait - it was the silence from said World Community™ that was deafening.

This, I believe, is when it became clear to me that the Nobel Peace Prize is a fraud, and the committee that selects it's winner each year is simply a bunch of Euroweenies that select whomever will embarrass the United States the most. Hence follow-up winners like Yassir Arafat, Kofi Annan, and Jim E. Carter. Powerline does a nice job of detailing "this subset of cosmopolitan frauds, fakers, murderers, thieves, and no-accounts going back about twenty years." Carter's win in particular confirmed the notion that the peace prize has little to do with peace, when the head of the selection committee actually had the honesty to come out and say that Carter was chosen in order to slap George W. Bush in the face over Iraq. Any self-respecting American would have told them to shove the award, but then who would ever describe Jim E. as "self-respecting"... or "American", for that matter? Jim E., like all good lefties, surely considers himself a citizen of The World Community™; America just happens to be the place he escaped from. But I digress...

Today we learn that the recipient of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Peace is none other than Earth's Preeminent Climatologist. What global climate has to do with "peace" escapes me, but there it is. Fortunately, this time the award has nothing to do with politics or embarrassing the Bush administration; I know this because they said so:

"We face a true planetary emergency," Gore said. "The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity."

The Nobel committee chairman, Ole Danbolt Mjoes, asserted that the prize was not aimed at the Bush administration, which rejected Kyoto and was widely criticized outside the U.S. for not taking global warming seriously enough.

This explanation leaves me a little confused. One would think"Peace" refers to a state in which two (or more) nations (or tribes, or ethnic groups, or some other type of political entity) get along with one another. That would make "peace" implicitly a political matter. If the alleged climate crisis is "not a political issue," how can it be a matter of peace? Will all wars end once we set the thermostat to a comfy temperature? Are jihadists beheading infidels because the polar ice cap is shrinking? What exactly is the connection between climate and peace? Ah, the answer is all the wat at the bottom of the article:

"It is a question of war and peace," said Egeland, now director of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs in Oslo. "We're already seeing the first climate wars, in the Sahel belt of Africa." He said nomads and herders are in conflict with farmers because the changing climate has brought drought and a shortage of fertile lands.

You've surely heard of the "climate wars," right? That's why World Community™ hasn't been able to stop the genocide in Darfur - because they've been busy keeping the peace between nomads, herders and farmers in the Sahel belt. Somehow I get the feeling that they actually believe the bullshit they spew.

I'm just an ignorant Global Warming Denier, but I believe that climatology is a scientific field, thus Earth's Preeminent Climatologist would be more apt to win one of the Nobel Prizes for science rather than the overtly political Peace prize. After all, political honors should be bestowed upon politicians, and Al Gore is nothing of the sort. Well, certainly not since the year 2000 when he retired from politics and embarked upon his brilliant climatology career. Still, I can't shake the idea that the reason Gore was not awarded a scientific award, perhaps, was that his assertions of impending doom and catastrophe would then have to hold up under real scientific scrutiny. Why spoil a perfectly good Nobel Prize with inconvenient details like that?

Labels: Commentary, Global Warm-Mongering

posted by Paul @ 11:04 AM