1)      Americans aren’t real sure who’s giving out the Nobel Prize these days or how many prizes there are.  Sorry, Friends, “Scandanavia” is not acceptable, “Copenhagen” is not acceptable, and “Denmark” is not acceptable. Among those who at least had a clue, Norway and Sweden split the rest of the “guesses.”  Three times this week Rajjpuut heard Oslo, Norway mentioned by television newscasters for the Nobel Prizes, plural, rather than Stockholm, Sweden which is what inspired Rajjpuut’s “survey.” The fact is that the prizes in Physics, Chemistry, Literature and Medicine have been handed out in Stockholm, Sweden, since Alfred Nobel’s death.   Likewise, the Peace Prize has been handed out in Oslo, Norway from the start . . . and no, there is NO prize for mathematics. John Nash, the mathematician (subject of the Oscar-winning movie “A Beautiful Mind”) shared the 1994 Nobel Prize for Economics which first was awarded about 1970.

2)     Rooughly 80% of the partygoers either didn’t know who Alfred Nobel was, or what he did, or why he created the Nobel Prizes. Nobel was the Swedish version of Thomas Edison.   A good deal of his energy went into armament research and he invented dynamite by combining nitroglycerin with an absorbent, inert substance (sort of like sawdust). A French newspaper screwed up in 1886 and declared Nobel dead. The obituary was very negative and contained the line “The merchant of death is now dead.” The story is that the shock of that obituary inspired Nobel to write a last will and testament which after his death in 1896 created the Nobel Prize Foundation.

3)     If the party was representative of Americans in general, our knowledge of the Nobel Peace Prize is really poor. Only one person answered the following question correctly:

Which TWO of these statements are TRUEST?**

1. Adolf Hitler was a leading Nobel Peace Prize nominee up until the invasion of Poland.
2. Albert Schweitzer and Mother Teresa both won the Peace Prize.
3. Mohandas K. Gandhi never received the Nobel Peace Prize despite being nominated five times.
4. Neither of the American Presidents who spoke in front of the Berlin Wall received the Peace Prize.
5. Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson both won the Peace Prize.
6. The person considered the most controversial Peace Price omission was actually scheduled to receive the prize but was assassinated late in the year and no posthumous Nobel Prizes are ever awarded.
7. All of the above . . .
8. None of the above . . .
9. This a trick question, isn’t it, you dirty bas____?

While there is always a bit of controversy over the other prizes (for example, it seems that somebody important is ALWAYS left out of at least one prize), the Peace Prize is clearly the most controversial and thought by many people to have recently become a political statement by the Swedes and to have little or nothing to do with PEACE itself.

                The biggest controversy about the Peace Prize has always been over the role of appeasement . . .  this year’s prize to Obama is really bizarre. The president was only in office for two weeks when he was nominated, a shocker considering that Schweitzer, MLK, and Mother Teresa earned their prizes for a lifetime’s work. To imagine that Neville Chamberlain and Hitler could ever be considered strong nominees for such an award, peace without honor must be very popular among those who decide on the Nobel Peace Prize. Folks like Churchill, JFK and Ronald Reagan NOT earning a peace prize is a travesty, all things considered.

Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,

Rajjpuut

** Items “G” and “I” are the “TRUEST” since to name only two of the absolutely true five statements found in ABCDE would mean that the other three choices are actually false or at least substantially so . . . sorry about the trick!

                Back in 2000, when the Nobel Peace Prize was jointly awarded to Al Gore and the United Nations’ IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), Rajjpuut commented to his now ex-wife that “I can’t believe it, every year it’s more and more political . . . Nobel must be rolling over and moaning in his grave!”   The question has become now nine years later,  now that real scientists are saying this is NOT the slam-dunk that the Nobel people thought it was, now that real scientific debate is occurring . . . when will Al Gore give back his prize?

Now, however I feel sorry for the IPCC. Despite all the criticism, they did proper science and their conclusions were scientific, so why in God’s name would they get a “peace prize?”Ah, because as the Nobel Committees realized, the science wasn’t conclusive (which is exactly what the IPCC said) . . . ah, because Gore had done no real science and they couldn’t justify giving him anything at all for no science unless . . . ah because they didn’t like George W. Bush raining on their (The European) leap to judgment on the issue . . . ah, because they found Gore’s movie entertaining . . . ah, because they wanted to make a political statement with their idiotic peace prize decision.   On the other hand, the IPCC did proper science and came to a proper set of conclusions,  to wit:

A.       They called it Global Climate Change (GCC) not “global warming” and they are right

B.      They stated GCC was occurring and they are right**

C.      They stated that greenhouse gas proliferation seemed to be the main causative agent (undoubtedly right, but they hardly paid enough attention to methane released when permafrost melts; methane is 20 times the greenhouse gas that carbon dioxide is)

D.      They stated that small and large climate shifts into colder and warmer eras were commonplace in the earth’s history (absolutely correct)

E.       They stated that the relative effects of man’s negative contributions and the natural processes were impossible to delineate (clearly true)

Unfortunately, the IPCC did not combine all their science with the wonderful investigations done by the History Channel as revealed in their marvelous dvd “Little Ice Age, Big Chill.” If they had, they might have come to a sixth correct conclusion: