NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: American special operations forces have been deployed to 135 countries this year alone.

This is what happens when Obama gets the Nobel Peace Prize.

Vladimir Putin Nominated For Nobel Peace Prize

Why not?  Obama got one for similar reasons: he's not George Bush.

The "Gaslight" President

 

Acting the lead role in the “most transparent administration” in history is a challenge, especially when your administration is spying on every phone call made and every byte that’s put on the Internet. But he’s pulled it off for a big part of the audience. How else can you get awarded the Nobel Peace Prize while “droning” your enemies, surging into Afghanistan and attacking Libya? How else can you keep Guantanamo open while giving speech after speech denouncing its existence? How else can you get rave reviews for your ethics while turning the IRS loose on your political opponents, claim to be outraged, and tell the world that the first time you heard about it was when you read it in the papers?

 

That, my friend, is a tour de force worthy of an Emmy.

 

The mind tricks that Obama plays on Americans are way beyond what Charles Boyer’s character plays on Ingrid Bergman in “Gaslight.” There is an eerie similarity between the 1944 movie and 2013 America. In the movie, Boyer wants everyone to think Bergman’s crazy. In America, Obama’s opponents are labeled crazy, or racist, or both. Remember how we were told that bloggers were people sitting in their basement wearing pajamas? Thanks to Obama’s adoring fans in the press an entire Internet communications company was named PJ Media after this famous slur. Sarah Palin was “Gaslighted” to the point where she’s labeled not only crazy but stupid.

 

Like every actor, Obama could not have achieved his stardom without an effective PR machine. In this case the MSM volunteered to do the job for free. Even after a full four year term in office, none of the economic, political, foreign policy or moral failures that America has experienced during his administration have been attributed to him. His PR machine blames his predecessor, his underlings or Mother Nature; never him.

 

Keep in mind, at heart he’s just a photogenic Chicago politician. And that’s the tragedy. Chicago, one of America’s great cities, has been systematically looted by its Democrat machine, much like the killer in Gaslight plots to loot his victim’s home.

  

We know how Gaslight ends. We are in our own sequel and we don’t know the ending. There is no guarantee that the good guys will win; they haven't so far. Perhaps this time, Boyer wins. There’s a lot of loot in America’s attic.

NEWS ALERT: Obama wins inter-galactic skeet shooting competition!

President Barack Obama today was awarded the trophy as the best shot in the universe.  He started his first term as president winning the Nobel Peace Prize for his stunning potential.

With this demonstration of athletic prowess as a skeeter, he now joins the select group of human immortals including Kim Jong Il, known for bowling perfect games and getting 5 holes in 1 during his first time playing golf.  Who can forget Mao setting a world swimming record when in his 60’s swimming the Yangtze river. And of course Fidel Castro who won enduring fame as a world class baseball player when in his 50’s.   

 

Skeeters world wide will now adopt Obama's perfect skeeter stance.

The European Union has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

I thought this was a joke when I read the headline in my e-mail.  But it's true.

Remember that they gave it to Obama for not being Bush. 

Are they trying to self destruct ... like Biden in that VP debate?

The Moral Dimension of Shinya Yamanaka's Stem Cell Research

Via William Saletan at Slate

Shinya Yamanaka, a scientist at Kyoto University, loved stem-cell research. But he didn’t want to destroy embryos. So he figured out a way around the problem. In a paper published five years ago in Cell, Yamanaka and six colleagues showed how “induced pluripotent stem cells” could be derived from adult cells and potentially substituted, in research and therapy, for embryonic stem cells. Today, that discovery earned him a Nobel Prize, shared with British scientist John Gurdon. But the prize announcement and much of the media coverage missed half the story. Yamanaka’s venture wasn’t just an experiment. It was a moral project.

In the introduction to their Cell paper, Yamanaka and his colleagues outlined their reasons for seeking an alternative to conventional embryonic stem-cell research. “Ethical controversies” came first in their analysis. Technical reasons—the difficulty of making patient-specific embryonic stem cells—came second. After the paper’s publication, Yamanaka told a personal story, related by the New York Times:

Inspiration can appear in unexpected places. Dr. Shinya Yamanaka found it while looking through a microscope at a friend’s fertility clinic. … [H]e looked down the microscope at one of the human embryos stored at the clinic. The glimpse changed his scientific career. “When I saw the embryo, I suddenly realized there was such a small difference between it and my daughters,” said Dr. Yamanaka … “I thought, we can’t keep destroying embryos for our research. There must be another way.”

There's aninteresting story that illustrates the moral emptyness of some other organizations. In 2009, the Lasker Foundation honored him while noting that his research overcame the controversy over embryonic stem cell research. In 2010, the Inamori Foundation gave him Kyoto Prize citing his ethical concerns. In 2012, the Technology Academy of Finland awarded him the Millennium Technology Prize, again referring to the ethical dimensionof his work. Yet ...

The Nobel committee, however, made no mention of Yamanaka’s moral achievement. Not in its presentation, not in its press release, not in its interview with the laureate. It credited him only with developing “new tools” to study disease and develop therapies. Many reporters took the same approach. In its 600-word story, CNN ignored the ethics of Yamanaka’s work. The Los Angeles Times called restrictions on embryo destruction mere “headaches” for scientists. The New York Times said Yamanaka’s work, like other stem-cell technologies, had “generated objections from people who fear, on ethical or religious grounds, that scientists are pressing too far into nature’s mysteries and the ability to create life artificially.”

That’s completely wrong. Even before Yamanaka’s landmark paper, pro-lifers were all over his work. They loved it. The Vatican followed had followed his research with interest for years. When Cell published his paper, a pro-life coalition immediately declared his method “superior to cloning as a means of obtaining patient-specific pluripotent stem cells.” In a homily distributed by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Cardinal Rigali declared that Yamanaka’s story about looking into a fertility-clinic microscope showed how “God can use a helpless embryo to change a human heart.” People at the National Right to Life Committee were openly rooting for Yamanaka to win a Nobel.

There is so much hatred for religion that the issue of ethics must never rear it's head, unless it's the ethics of Liberalism.

Ambassador Chris Stevens Is Dead; Al-Qaeda Is Alive

Rand Simberg

In our last discussion of Obama campaign myths, I recalled Joe Biden’s campaign bumper sticker that “Bin Laden is dead, and GM is alive.” We dismantled the latter part of it there. Now it’s time to take on the “Bin Laden is dead.”

Now just as GM is literally (as Joe Biden would say, whether it was or not) alive, if on life support, bin Laden is certainly dead, even if the evidence was disposed of, but in both cases, the phrases were code. With regard to the latter, it is code for “we beat al-Qaeda.” But in order to decode it, one must accept the premise that Osama bin Laden was identically equal to al-Qaeda, and that it would not survive his being fed to the fishes. And that is and always was nonsense.

We were not at war with Osama bin Laden. Unlike Hitler, he did not invent the ideology. He merely took an existing one, and implemented it in a way unprecedented in modern times (though it had been in full force for centuries in the past — unfortunately, most people are unaware of history). He is not, and never was, essential to its survival. There was no signing of a surrender on the deck of the Missouri tonight. The troops cannot come home simply because we killed one guy who had been on the run for years.

Obama went to Cairo to proclaim a new era in relations. Lowering the seas and healing the planet was not enough, now we would be friends with Islam. Then Islam would be friends with us.

Yes, a little over three years after the revolution of new Arab relations with the U.S., Barack Obama is being burned in effigy overseas.

How's that working out?

"You didn't earn that ...Somebody else made that happen"

Academic for Sale.

At the Cato Institute:  Stiglitz’s Switch in Time

Speaking before a group of protesters in Zuccotti Park, Nobel economics prize winner Joseph Stiglitz urged on the crowd, telling them they are “right to be indignant.” Professor Stiglitz goes on to explain, correctly in my view, that we have a financial system of socialized losses and privatized gains.

What the good professor fails to mention is only a few years ago, for what I understand was a nice paycheck, he was denying this very fact. In 2004, along with Jonathan and Peter Orszag, Professor Stiglitz wrote a paper for Fannie Mae in which he “estimated” that the “risk to the government from a potential default on GSE debt is effectively zero.” The paper goes on to argue “that the expected cost to the government of providing an explicit government guarantee on $1 trillion in GSE debt is just $2 million.” Now I understand his Nobel is in economics, not math, but $2 million sounds no where near the actual cost so far of $160 billion.

Certainly there was a time where some could be forgiven for not really understanding the nature of Fannie and Freddie, but this was published after Freddie’s accounting scandals came to light and while Fannie itself was being investigated.

So yes, you do have a right to be indignant. Especially at those “academics” who sold their work to the highest bidder defending the system and now pretend to be shocked at how everything turned out.

It's remarkable, really, isn't it that you can no longer hide the things you wrote just a few years ago? Thanks to the Internet, ordinary people can show you turning your coat.

The Nobel Prize and the Nobel Memorial Prize

Here’s something you may not know. Paul Krugman did not win a Nobel Prize. He won a Nobel Memorial Prize.

The Nobel Prizes were established by the foundation Alfred Nobel funded at his death.

In 1896, Alfred Nobel, the Swedish industrialist and inventor of dynamite, bequeathed his fortune to a foundation to create an annual prize for person "who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind." Nobel's will specified prizes in physics, chemistry, physiology/medicine, literature and peace. These were first awarded in 1901.

Note that there were no prizes for economics; economics not being regarded – even today – as one of the “hard” sciences.

In 1969, the Swedish central bank (Sveriges Riskbank) established a prize known as the "Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel", which is commonly shortened to the Nobel Memorial Prize. The Nobel Memorial Prize has a similar procedure of award selection (by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences) as the original Nobel prizes. It also disburses the same monetary amounts and shares in the formal ceremony.

This may be nitpicking, but there are a lot of nits to pick with the Nobel and Nobel Memorial Prizes. The primary one is that the awards are often given, not as recognition for outstanding achievement, but to move an agenda in the direction that the Nobel committee deems desirable … which fully explains its award to Barack Obama.