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Revisiting the prize controversy, Pickerhead thought it would be nice to put a face to some of the people who made the decision. We attached a picture of the head of the committee, Thorbjørn Jagland, to a Financial Times interview with the committee’s secretary. The article closes with this defense, “Some of our most controversial {picks} have been the most successful.” So you see, they’re not reacting to what someone or some institution did. They want to be in the game. They want to have influence. Perhaps if the kid president soon decides to bug out of Afghanistan, then next year the Nobel Peace Prize Committee can award the prize to …….. the Nobel Peace Prize Committee. How is that for the ultimate self-gratification? Or would that be a circle jerk?

… The Peace prize is the only Nobel award handled by the Norwegian committee. All the others are decided by institutions in Alfred Nobel’s native Sweden. He allocated the responsibilities in his will without any explanation for why Norway should oversee the Peace prize.

Some have speculated that he viewed Norway as more peace-loving than his own country and feared the prize would become a tool of Swedish foreign policy. Others say it reflects his admiration for Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, a Norwegian novelist and peace activist.

There was nothing in the will to insist that committee members must be Norwegian and there have been frequent calls for foreigners to be admitted. Mr Lundestad says that, while an all-Norwegian panel is “hard to defend,” there are “strong practical reasons” for the status quo.

It would be difficult for an international panel to hold the numerous meetings involved – the committee met seven times this year to review 205 nominees – and harder still to decide which countries should be represented, he argued. … (Maybe Norway has no internet)

Jennifer Rubin says that liberal reaction and concern has made the Obama peace prize helpful to the nation.

Conservatives couldn’t have dreamed up a clarifying event this effective. But thanks to the Nobel Peace Prize, an epidemic of common sense and queasiness about multiculturalism is breaking out even among liberals.  Howard Fineman writes:

“Obama isn’t going to be sworn in as planetary president. But it doesn’t matter; in his mind, he already is.  …

Fineman is inspired enough by this spasm of international foolishness to remind his Newsweek readers that playing to the Nobel Prize Committee and like-minded fans in the “international community” just may not be a good thing. Turns out that the international community doesn’t always want what’s in our best interests:

“For one, what the world wants is not necessarily what America needs, or what the voters care about. Most of the world wants us to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan right now. Most of the world would like to see the dollar lose its role as the reserve currency. Many, many citizens of the world think that Hugo Chávez is a cool dude and that Iran has every right to buy uranium centrifuges and stash them underground.” …

In The NY Times, Ross Douthat writes that Obama should have refused the prize.

…People have argued that you can’t turn down a Nobel. Please. Of course you can. Obama is a gifted rhetorician with world-class speechwriters. All he would have needed was a simple, graceful statement emphasizing the impossibility of accepting such an honor during his first year in office, with America’s armed forces still deep in two unfinished wars. …

…In any case, it will be far more offensive when Obama takes the stage in Oslo this November instead of Morgan Tsvangirai, Zimbabwe’s heroic opposition leader; or Thich Quang Do, the Buddhist monk and critic of Vietnam’s authoritarian regime; or Rebiya Kadeer, exiled from China for her labors on behalf of the oppressed Uighur minority; or anyone who has courted death this year protesting for democracy in the Islamic Republic of Iran. …

…Obama gains nothing from the prize. No domestic constituency will become more favorably disposed to him because five Norwegians think he’s already changed the world — and the Republicans were just handed the punch line for an easy recession-era attack ad. (To quote the Democratic strategist Joe Trippi, anticipating the 30-second spots to come: “He got a Nobel Prize. What did you get? A pink slip.”) …

J. E. Dyer, in Contentions, has an update on Iran, and the Obama administration’s continued foreign policy missteps, made all the more tragic by Obama receiving the peace prize.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post suggest that this year’s Nobel Peace Prize should have gone to Iran’s imprisoned and battered reform protesters (specifically, said the Post, to Neda Agha-Soltan) instead of to Barack Obama. Both op-eds focus on the encouragement such an award would have been for the cause of political reform in Iran; the Journal also speculates that a Nobel might have made a difference to the fate of the three Iranian dissidents sentenced to death over the weekend for their participation in the post-election protests. …

…In a like spirit, former president Mohammad Khatami, a political moderate now publicly aligned with besieged reform leaders Mousavi and Kourabi, posted a defiant declaration on his website after the death sentences were announced, assuring Iranians that the reform movement would not die.

In the face of this bravery, our Nobel-winning president has gone beyond his original hands-off posture on Iran’s internal business, and even beyond his administration’s affirmation in early August that Ahmadinejad is Iran’s “elected president.” Now Obama’s USAID organization has decided to cut off funding for the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. The IHRDC, whose principal current project is documenting abuse of reform protesters since the June election, was first funded under Bush five years ago and has extensively documented the brutality of the Islamic revolutionary regime, including its assassination campaign against dissidents abroad and the 1988 massacre of political prisoners.

The CATO Institute’s Ted Galen Carpenter interprets this USAID decision as a “relatively minor concession” by the Obama administration to establish “Washington’s goodwill” in talks with Iran. The State Department has declined to give a reason for the funding cut-off. We should expect none, of course. A Nobel Peace Prize means never having to explain your lack of interest in human rights.

One last item on the prize for now. Camille Paglia should be out soon, and, no doubt, will have something to add. Your servant will provide that as soon as it shows up. This last piece is by George Friedman of Stratfor who explains why the prize makes sense to left-wing Europeans. It’s here so you can learn something, but Pickerhead still thinks they are free-riding Euro-weenies.

…The Europeans experienced catastrophes during the 20th century. Two world wars slaughtered generations of Europeans and shattered Europe’s economy. Just after the war, much of Europe maintained standards of living not far above that of the Third World. In a sense, Europe lost everything — millions of lives, empires, even sovereignty as the United States and the Soviet Union occupied and competed in Europe. The catastrophe of the 20th century defines Europe, and what the Europeans want to get away from. …

…Between 1945 and 1991, Western Europe lived in a confrontation with the Soviets. The Europeans lived in dread of Soviet occupation, and though tempted, never capitulated to the Soviets. That meant that the Europeans were forced to depend on the United States for their defense and economic stability, and were therefore subject to America’s will. How the Americans and Russians viewed each other would determine whether war would break out, not what the Europeans thought.

Every aggressive action by the United States, however trivial, was magnified a hundredfold in European minds, as they considered fearfully how the Soviets would respond. In fact, the Americans were much more restrained during the Cold War than Europeans at the time thought. …

…For Europe, prosperity had become an end in itself. …Today’s Europeans value economic comfort above all other considerations. After Sept. 11, the United States seemed willing to take chances with the Europeans’ comfortable economic condition that the Europeans themselves didn’t want to take. They loathed George W. Bush for doing so. …

…The Norwegian politicians gave their prize to Obama because they believed that he would leave Europeans in their comfortable prosperity without making unreasonable demands. That is their definition of peace, and Obama seemed to promise that. …

…The Norwegians awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to the president of their dreams, not the president who is dealing with Iran and Afghanistan. Obama is not a free actor. He is trapped by the reality he has found himself in, and that reality will push him far away from the Norwegian fantasy. In the end, the United States is the United States — and that is Europe’s nightmare, because the United States is not obsessed with maintaining Europe’s comfortable prosperity. The United States cannot afford to be, and in the end, neither can President Obama, Nobel Peace Prize or not.

Thomas Sowell gives a clear overview of the housing crisis and recession. And he fixes the ultimate blame where it belongs – on the politicians meddling with the economy.

…Politicians to the rescue: Federal regulatory agencies leaned on banks to lend to people they were not lending to before — or else. The “or else” included not having their business decisions approved by the regulators, which could cost them more money than making risky loans.

Mortgage lending standards were lowered, in order to raise the magic number of home ownership. But, with lower lending standards, there were — surprise! — more mortgage payment delinquencies, defaults and foreclosures.

This was a problem not only for banks and other lenders but also for those in the business of buying mortgages from the original lenders. These included semi-government enterprises like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as well as Wall Street firms that bought mortgages, bundled them together and issued securities based on the anticipated income from those mortgages.

In other words, all these economic transactions were “interconnected,” … And when the people who owed money on their mortgages stopped paying, the whole house of cards began to fall.

Politicians may not know much — or care much — about economics, but they know politics and they care a lot about keeping their jobs. So a great distracting hue and cry has gone up that all this was due to the market not being regulated enough by the government. In reality, it was precisely the government regulators who forced the banks to lower their lending standards. …

Debra J. Saunders, in The San Francisco Chronicle, picks up on Paul Hudson’s global warming article posted in Pickings yesterday.

…Western Washington University geologist Don J. Easterbrook presented research last year that suggests that the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO) caused warmer temperatures in the 1980s and 1990s. With Pacific sea surface temperatures cooling, Easterbrook expects 30 years of global cooling.

EPA analyst Alan Carlin – an MIT-trained economist with a degree in physics – referred to “solar variability” and Easterbrook’s work in a document that warned that politics had prompted the Environmental Protection Agency and countries to pay “too little attention to the science of global warming” as partisans ignored the lack of global warming over the past 10 years. At first the EPA buried the paper, then it permitted Carlin to post it on his personal Web site. …

…Over the years, global warming alarmists have sought to stifle debate by arguing that there was no debate. They bullied dissenters and ex-communicated nonbelievers from their panels. In the name of science, disciples made it a virtue to not recognize the existence of scientists such as MIT’s Richard Lindzen and Colorado State University’s William Gray.

For a long time, that approach worked. But after 11 years without record temperatures that had the seas spilling over the Statue of Liberty’s toes, they are going to have to change tactics. …

Old fool that he is, the Archbishop of Canterbury has silly advice on the globalony front. Wants people to grow stuff in their backyards. Cool thing is, the London Times linked to a piece debunking the churchman’s claims. We have that, and then some more on the ”locavore” movement.  Ben Webster writes:

In an interview with The Times, Dr Rowan Williams said that families needed to respond to the threat of climate change by changing their shopping habits and adjusting their diets to the seasons, eating fruit and vegetables that could be grown in Britain.

He said that the carbon footprint of peas from Kenya and other airfreighted food was too high and families should not assume that all types of food would be available through the year. Dr Williams called for more land to be made available for allotments, saying that they would help people to reconnect with nature and wean them off a consumerist lifestyle.

The Archbishop was accused, however, of threatening the livelihoods of a million families in sub-Saharan Africa, who depended on exports of fresh produce to Europe. …

Tristan McConnell, in The Times, UK, gives a snapshot of the Kenyon agriculture export business.

…Pre-industrial methods are still the norm, with fields tilled by hand or with ox-drawn ploughs. For many Kenyans, the money earned pays for school fees and better diets for their children.

Last month the Africa Research Institute, a London-based think-tank, published a report praising Kenya’s fruit, veg and flower industry for its environment-friendly carbon footprint. “The vast majority of Kenyan produce exported to Europe is carried in the hold of passenger aircraft carrying Western tourists home from the safari parks and beaches of East Africa,” Mark Ashurst, its director, said.

“To suggest that this shouldn’t happen is to penalise a globally competitive African industry for the carbon footprint of European holidaymakers.”

Brian Dunning, on SkepticBlog.org, discusses how locally grown doesn’t mean efficiently delivered. Dunning consulted for a market chain, he writes.

…In their early days, they did indeed follow a true farmers’ market model. Farmers would either deliver their product directly to the store, or they would send a truck out to each farmer. As they added store locations, they continued practicing direct delivery between farmer and store. Adding a store in a new town meant finding a new local farmer for each type of produce in that town. Usually this was impossible: Customers don’t live in the same places where farms are found. Farms are usually located between towns. So Henry’s ended up sending a number of trucks from different stores to the same farm. Soon, Henry’s found that the model of minimal driving distance between each farm and each store resulted in a rat’s nest of redundant driving routes crisscrossing everywhere. What was intended to be efficient, local, and friendly, turned out to be not just inefficient, but grossly inefficient. Henry’s was burning huge amounts of diesel that they didn’t need to burn.

You can guess what happened. They began combining routes. This meant fewer, larger trucks, and less diesel burned. They experimented with a distribution center to serve some of their closely clustered stores. The distribution center added a certain amount of time and labor to the process, but it (a) still accomplished same-day morning delivery from farm to store, and (b) cut down on mileage tremendously. Henry’s added larger distribution centers, and realized even better efficiency.  …

…Locally grown produce is rarely efficient. Apply a little mathematics to the problem, and you’ll find that the ugly alternative of giant suburban distribution centers accomplishes the same thing – fresh produce into stores on the same day it’s picked – but with much less fuel burned. …

…Too often, environmentalists are satisfied with the mere appearance and accoutrements of environmentalism, without regard for the underlying facts. Apply some mathematics and some economics, and you’ll find that a smaller environmental footprint is the natural result of improved efficiency.

The Borowitz Report has more awards to give Obama.