The Nobel Prize has become a laughing stock. The Nobel Committee gave the Peace prize to Obama, one of the worst warmongers of the 21st century second only to Bush/Cheney. And now the Nobel Committee has awarded the medicine prize to two “scientists� who concocted the most dangerous “vaccine� ever released on the world with... Read More

schrub says: I recently heard a rather revealing story about Phillip Roth. In or 2015 or 2016 the committee that was to chose the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature came under intense pressure to award the prize to the then-ailing Roth since Nobel Prizes cannot be awarded after a recipient’s death. Besides the... Read More

Nobel prize winners are supposed to have done something useful. Marie Curie discovered radioactivity – and thus gave us, among other things, X-rays. As for Albert Einstein, even before he became famous for his theory of relativity, he won a Nobel for describing photons, whose most familiar latter-day application is in optical fiber communications. Meanwhile... Read More

Yesterday I predicted that the winner of the 2013 Nobel economics prize would be an Anglophone quack – and in all probability as dangerous a quack as so many previous laureates. The news from Stockholm today is that the 2013 prize will be shared by three economists – Eugene Fama, Lars Peter Hansen, and Robert... Read More

Monday morning update: The Bank of Sweden has now announced the 2013 prize and I have posted a separate commentary here. EF Any day now the Bank of Sweden will announce a new Nobel economics laureate. Judging by the bank’s record, he is likely to be an aging Anglophone, Caucasian male. He is also likely... Read More

[Update: It is possible that AP’s visit to Liu Xia was facilitated by the regime. For a possible precedent see Blind guy evades 100 captors and gets to Beijing just in time to give Hillary Clinton a headache. However, the timing doesn’t seem right to me, as the reportage on Liu Xia detracted from the... Read More

Which allowed everyman to safely manage large explosions. While living in Europe I knew many Scandinavians and found them particularly free from guile. The awarding of the Nobel Peace prize to Barack Obama makes me wonder, however. Are they trying to make the man fit the suit that they bought for him? Do they think... Read More

I suppose we should not �begrudge Barack Obama his Nobel Peace Prize, though it represents a� radical break in tradition, since he's only had slightly less than nine months to discharge his imperial duties, most concretely �through the agency of high explosives in the Hindu Kush whereas laureates like Henry Kissinger had been diligently slaughtering... Read More

Put this one up on the shelf of shame, right next to Henry Kissinger's, or the peace prize they gave to Kofi Annan and the entire UN in 2001, sandwiched between the UN's okay for the bombing of Serbia, the killing of untold numbers of Iraqis, many of them babies and children in the years... Read More

Now they've given Jimmy Carter the Nobel Peace Prize. Looking at the present, wretched incumbent, Democrats feel smug about their paladin of peace. But there's continuity in Empire. Presidents come and Presidents go. There are differences, but over much vital terrain the line of march adopted by the Commander in Chief doesn't deviate down the... Read More

In Commonweal, Vol. 93 (Dec. 18, 1970) pp. 296-98 It is bad enough that the field of psychology has for so long been a non-social science, viewing the motive forces of personality as deriving from internal psychic experiences rather than from man’s interaction with his social setting. Similarly in the field of economics: since its... Read More