The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy: Product Recall Notice from the Nobel Committee Jeffrey Jena | Bio

I am sitting here watching the nation of Israel having to defend itself from yet another series of rocket attacks for the God-knows-how-manyth time. Yet when the media spins the events it's those horrible, horrible Jews beating up on the poor little Hamas guys. The strange thing is that according to the Noble Prize committee this was supposed to be over years ago. Maybe you are too young or were still recovering from the eighties but back in 1994 the Nobel Committee declared the conflict in the Middle East over and awarded the Peace prize to Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin. That was the end of the hostilities between the Jews and their neighbors! Since then hardly violence or terrorism has been seen in Israel or Palestine.

This has gotten me to wondering about the Nobel prizes in general. I have given up on trying to figure out how, even if Al Gore was right, giving a paid speech about the environment and then putting it on film makes the world less prone to war. When I was young I thought of the Nobels as recognition of pure achievement. I also used to believe in Santa and the tooth fairy. Lately I have begun to wonder if maybe the Nobel Prize isn't more like Last Comic Standing or a Don King fight, pretty much an arranged contest as long as you are connected to the right people. Is there anyone out there who thinks that if Key Biscayne is still above water in twenty years that either Al or the Noble committee will come forward with a "My bad."

In 2005 the Nobel folks found Mohamed ElBaradei worthy of the highest award for Peace for his efforts in stopping nuclear proliferation on his watch. Apparently the committee didn't get the memo about North Korea and Iran.

Then we have the awarding of the Nobel for economics last year to Paul Krugman. I know Krugman mostly as a writer of moronic liberal tripe for the New York Times. I did a little research and found that he holds PhD from MIT and teaches at Princeton. So he's plenty smart but even smart guys can make mistakes. Look at Linus Pauling, he won a Nobel in chemistry and then thought he could stop nuclear war and live forever if he just took enough vitamin C. I wanted to be fair I went and tried to read some of Krugman's work on Economics and it had exactly the same effect on me as Econ 101 had in college; I was asleep before I finished the third page. I'm sure no economics whiz and maybe I should have read more than the DC Comic version of Krugman's paper but from what I could tell he has a theory that when globalization occurs and Nike builds a shoe factory in Ho Chi Minh City guys will quit working in rice paddies and start sewing up Air Jordan's. I guess that's brilliant but so is the guy who helped me take the catalytic converter off of my truck and took my MPG from 19 to 27. He should get a Nobel but I don't think they have a category for ex-cons who help you save money.

I couldn't give you a fair evaluation of Mr. Krugman's abilities as a theoretical economist but I do know his politics and if he wrote for the Washington Times instead of the New York Times I'm betting he wouldn't be showing his medal to the co-eds in South Jersey.