You all know that it’s the King Of Sweden who gives the Nobel Prizes, with a huge dinner and everything. But why is it the Norwegian Parliament, (known as the Storting) that gives the Nobel Peace Prize? Well, the problem is that most people can’t tell one part of Scandinavia from another, so I’ll let Lene Johansen, (pictured) who I think is from Norwegia, or one of those, explain:

“Alfred Nobel’s testament assigned the responsibility of the Peace Prize to the Norwegian parliament, which is called the Storting. When Nobel died in 1896, Norway was not yet independent, though there was local self-rule. Thus the Norwegians would be in charge of the Peace Prize because they would be able to keep the Prize untainted from national political concerns.

Norway gained independence in 1905 and gained control over its own foreign policy. The Storting selects the Nobel Committee, but the tradition is to select emeritus members of the political community that are no longer in active politics.

[The Truth About Obama's Nobel Prize| Nobel Prize Committee Chair Thorbjørn Jagland is shamelessly seeking the spotlight, October 13, 2009]

Of course, now that Norway does have its own foreign policy, it seems to have been using its Nobel picks in an attempt to influence American policy. As Steve Sailer has explained, adopting Scandinavian ideas in America is not a good idea.

Lene Johansen, a native of Norway, writes in Reason magazine that that the politicians involved in awarding the Affirmative Action Nobel are doing it partly for their own self-aggrandizement, and partly because of “Norwegian ambitions for being an international powerbroker in humanitarian work”:

I can see Jagland being ingenuous enough to think the Nobel Prize will help Obama bring Obama-style hope and change to the rest of the world. When the TV2 reporter asked him about a potential domestic backlash against Obama due to the award, Jagland was clueless.

“They should be proud of a leader that shows such a good stance to the world, and who promotes the will of the world community the way he has done,” said Jagland.

It is not the first time he makes bad judgment calls in foreign policy. While he was Secretary of State in 2001, he called the president of Gabon “Bongo from Kongo” on national television. The Norwegian version of the Onion, Opplysningskontoret, ran a story stating the Nobel Prize was awarded to Bongo from Brooklyn. There were 100 versions of this joke on Twitter on Friday.

Obama’s embarrassment was due to Jagland’s desire to reinstate his public image as a statesman. The most telling sign is probably a comment Jagland made in one of his post-announcement interview.

“It was exciting to meet the world press,” he said. “One of the most exciting things I have done.” [The Truth About Obama's Nobel Prize| Nobel Prize Committee Chair Thorbjørn Jagland is shamelessly seeking the spotlight, October 13, 2009]

From Nature, October 8, 2009:

Let’s celebrate human genetic diversity

Science is finding evidence of genetic diversity among groups of people as well as among individuals. This discovery should be embraced, not feared, say Bruce T. Lahn and Lanny Ebenstein.

A growing body of data is revealing the nature of human genetic diversity at increasingly finer resolution. It is now recognized that despite the high degree of genetic similarities that bind humanity together as a species, considerable diversity exists at both individual and group levels (see box, page 728). The biological significance of these variations remains to be explored fully. But enough evidence has come to the fore to warrant the question: what if scientific data ultimately demonstrate that genetically based biological variation exists at non-trivial levels not only among individuals but also among groups? In our view, the scientific community and society at large are ill-prepared for such a possibility. We need a moral response to this question that is robust irrespective of what research uncovers about human diversity. Here, we argue for the moral position that genetic diversity, from within or among groups, should be embraced and celebrated as one of humanity’s chief assets.

The current moral position is a sort of ‘biological egalitarianism’. This dominant position emerged in recent decades largely to correct grave historical injustices, including genocide that were committed with the support of pseudo scientific understandings of group diversity. The racial-hygiene theory promoted by German geneticists Fritz Lenz, Eugene Fischer and others during the Nazi era is one notorious example of such pseudoscience. Biological egalitarianism is the view that no or almost no meaningful genetically based biological differences exist among human groups, with the exception of a few superficial traits such as skin colour. Proponents of this view seem to hope that, by promoting biological sameness, discrimination against groups or individuals will become groundless.

We believe that this position, although well intentioned, is illogical and even dangerous, as it implies that if significant group diversity were established, discrimination might thereby be justified. We reject this position. Equality of opportunity and respect for human dignity should be humankind’s common aspirations, notwithstanding human differences no matter how big or small. We also think that biological egalitarianism may not remain viable in light of the growing body of empirical data.

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Ann Althouse on Canada’s hate speech laws:

Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant testify about the completely out-of-control pursuit of hate speech in Canada.

I won’t attempt to summarize. Listen to the testimony before Parliament’s Justice and Human Rights Committee. What has gone on in Canada is truly revolting. The procedural abuses are astounding, and to think that it was all done for a goal that is itself illegitimate — crushing offensive speech.[More]

The text of Ezra Levant’s prepared speech gives his opening statement first in English, then in French, since it’s addressed to Canada’s bilingual parliament. As far as I can tell from the YouTube, he didn’t actually deliver it in both languages. This horrifyingly boring procedure is common in Canada, and may be coming to the US right along with hate speech legislation. I saw it in video of the “Million Immigrant March” three years ago.

If you look at the people picking up the Nobel Peace Prize, they’re frequently “indigenous” people like the mendacious Rigoberta Menchu or Third World “wise men” like Mohammed Yunus. , Wangari Maathai, or Shirin Ebadi. (All together now–“Who?”)But if someone is going to discover something new in physics, chemistry, or medicine…not so much. John Derbyshire posted this at SecularRight–Ice People Club:

Scanning back through the last ten years, I get the following headcounts.

I have used the Ice People / Sun People schema of We Are Doomed, with Europeans and East Asians as Ice People, Africans and Amerindians as Sun People. Subcontinental Asians I have cut crudely, with Moslems as honorary Sun People and non-Muslims as honorary Ice People. It’s a fair balance, I think, and doesn’t actually make much difference to the numbers.

Here we go. For each year I list the six Nobel categories in order:  Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature, Peace, and Economics. The score in each box is Ice People / Sun People, so “2-0″ means two Ice People and no Sun People.

Year	Phys	Chem	Med	Lit	Peace	Econ
2009	3-0	3-0	3-0	1-0	0-1	TBA
2008	3-0	3-0	3-0	1-0	1-0	1-0
2007	2-0	1-0	3-0	1-0	1-0	3-0
2006	2-0	1-0	2-0	1-0	0-1	1-0
2005	3-0	3-0	3-0	1-0	0-1	2-0
2004	3-0	3-0	2-0	1-0	0-1	2-0
2003	3-0	2-0	2-0	1-0	0-1	2-0
2002	3-0	3-0	3-0	1-0	1-0	1-0
2001	3-0	3-0	3-0	1-0	0-1	3-0
2000	3-0	3-0	3-0	1-0	1-0	2-0

That gives us totals of 28-0 for Physics, 25-0 for Chemistry, 27-0 for Medicine, 10-0 for Literature, 4-6 for Peace, 17-0 for Economics.

This provoked a lot of point-and-splutter, plus personal attacks in the 51 (so far) comments. Even before the age of affirmative action, the Nobel Peace Prize has always been the Special Olympics of the Nobel World. You don’t have to achieve peace, you just have to mean well.

• 1910 - Permanent International Peace Bureau
• 1913 - Henri La Fontaine

Both prizes awarded for, basically, preventing the First World War, which went ahead and happened anyhow

• 1925 - Sir Austen Chamberlain, Charles G. Dawes
• 1926 - Aristide Briand, Gustav Stresemann
• 1929 - Frank B. Kellogg
• 1931 - Jane Addams, Nicholas Murray Butler
• 1933 - Sir Norman Angell
• 1935 - Carl von Ossietzky
• 1937 - Robert Cecil

All those prizes were for actions tending to prevent the Second World War, which went ahead and happened anyhow.

Closer to our own time, we read that

• 1973 - Henry Kissinger, Le Duc Tho

Shared a prize for making peace in Vietnam. Two years later, North Vietnam, deploying Soviet arms and Democratic congressmen, invaded and conquered South Vietnam.

• 1976 - Betty Williams, Mairead Corrigan

Shared a prize for bringing peace to Northern Ireland, which peace was brought again in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, (basically a surrender) after some more violence George Bush brought peace to Northern Ireland once more in 2007 and if you’re interested, Hillary Clinton is in Belfast right now, bringing it yet again.

• 1993 - Nelson Mandela, F.W. de Klerk

Shared a prize for bringing  peace to South Africa–which is not notably peaceful.

• 1994 - Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin

Solved the problems of the Middle East. No comment. So if Obama doesn’t deserve the Nobel, and he doesn’t, he’s not the first.

In the pages of the New York Times, David Brooks once more bravely explore pathways beyond Sailerism’s complete stranglehold on the mass media.

In “The Young and the Neuro,” Brooks reports on the conference of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society’s, where all the scientists were “so damned young, hip and attractive.” Brooks then proceeds to recount the usual grab bag of studies about how different parts of the brain activate when shown pictures of people of different races or whatever, and sums up:

I suspect that the work will take us beyond the obsession with I.Q. and other conscious capacities and give us a firmer understanding of motivation, equilibrium, sensitivity and other unconscious capacities.

Isn’t it a shame how Linda Gottfredson makes $50k per speech to corporate executives while poor Malcolm Gladwell barely ekes out a living? *

Unfortunately, Brooks’ column about brain scans isn’t very persuasive because there aren’t any pictures of brains in it. As every editor knows, a picture of a brain in an article about brains makes the article convincing. A 2006 study in Cognition showed that “assertions about psychology — even implausible ones like “watching television improved math skills” — seem much more believable to laypeople when accompanied by images from brain scans.”

(You know what would be the perfect “social cognitive neuroscience” experiment? Do brain scans on people while they are being shown pictures of brain scans. The part of the brain that lights up could be renamed the Credulity Lobe.)

For example, here is a scan of David Brooks’ brain during his daily reading of iSteve. As you can see, the experience is stimulating both the Man-I-Wish-I-Could-Say-Interesting-Stuff-Like-That and the But-I-Can’t-Or-I’ll-Lose-My-Job-So-I’ll-Say-the-Opposite sectors of his brain.

You just can’t argue with Science.

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* By the way, Malcolm’s new article on football and concussions is pretty good.

Political scientist Elinor Ostrom became the first woman winner in the four decades of the Economics quasi-Nobel Prize. I wasn’t familiar with her name, but her field of of study is a good one, so she’s probably a good pick. She works on the question of the various ways people arrange to avoid “the tragedy of the commons” of over-exploitation of common resources, such as fisheries.

As I noted in VDARE.com in 2005, Jared Diamond offers a succinct explanation of the possible solutions in his bestseller Collapse:

In another important section, Diamond illustrates how ethnic diversity makes environmental cooperation more difficult. He praises the Dutch as the most cooperative nation on earth and attributes their awareness of and willingness to tackle problems to their shared memory of the 1953 flood that drowned 2,000 Netherlanders living below sea level. (Unfortunately, he doesn’t mention whether Holland’s rapidly growing immigrant Muslim population remembers when the dikes failed 52 years ago.)

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